Doomsday? Mayan prophecy brings entertainment to Chinese

"Dear friends, please don't contact me tomorrow since I'm gonna save the world. If the sun rises as usual on Dec. 22, it means I succeeded..."

Jokes like this were forwarded widely by the Chinese via mobile phones and on microblogging sites such as Weibo.com when the "Doomsday" hour approached.

Thankfully, the world-saving heroes did "succeed."

"The world did not end as I have to work overtime this weekend!" Netizen "Num_9" said on Saturday morning.

"Hey guys, 'Doomsday' on the Mayan calendar was postponed because it had to give way to the winter solstice on the Chinese lunar calendar," "Xiaoxiao" wrote on Weibo.

Dec. 21 this year was the winter solstice, a Chinese festival with a tradition of more than 2,500 years when the sun appears at its lowest altitude at noon in the northern Hemisphere.

Ahead of "Doomsday" some people were looking to buy "tickets" to "arks" as depicted in the science fiction disaster movie 2012, which references Mayanism.

A ticket to board such an "ark" was "sold" for one billion yuan on some fake websites.

Even on Saturday, postcards of such tickets recorded sales on taobao.com, one of the country's leading online shopping websites. More than 1,800 kinds of postcards, including boat tickets, car tickets, train tickets and VIP cards were sold.

Pan Feng, an office staff worker in Shanghai, bought 20 postcards of a "Noah's Ark ticket" as a gift for her friends and colleagues for Dec. 21.

According to the movie, more than 400,000 people were chosen to board the arks which were constructed at a so-called Qiuming Valley in southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region.

The valley is an area at a small basin three kilometers away from the Mainling Airport in Tibet's Nyingchi Prefecture.

When Xinhua reporters visited the valley on Thursday afternoon, two soldiers of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) guarding a small power station asked with a smile, "Are you coming to board the ark?"

One of the soldiers led reporters to the back of the station and pointed to a 20-meter-wide and 30-meter-high dam, or rather, a cement barricade wall preventing a landslide, and said that it was a "shipyard."

When a plane flew above, a soldier joked that "maybe some presidential plane is arriving."

In east China's Zhejiang Province, inventer Yang Zongfu was busy producing his version of arks, a type of survival capsule after the apocalypse, which sold at between 1.5 million yuan (238,095 U.S. dollars) and 5 million yuan. He received 26 orders.

"Have you bought the ark tickets?" became a popular greeting for students at Jianxi Agricultural University instead of the traditional Chinese saying "Have you had your meal?"

Fang Zhenwu, an instructor with the university said many students also used "Doomsday" as an opportunity to confess love.

Online home appliance vendors also took advantage of the "Doomsday" craze to promote sales by offering larger discounts. Book stores had a sales boom on reading material about survival skills in the wild. The demand for camping tools, including candles, survival packs, portable sleeping bags, surged in the last two weeks.

"We are busy working and living under pressure, and our lives need some sort of entertainment," said Pan Feng, "The Doomsday tale provides us with a chance to have a bit of fun."