On January 20, Weibo user @hdj0428 snapped these photos of bacon curtains on Wuhan City's Lumo Road.
"Frightened me out of my gourd," she wrote. "So this is how the elite guard their apartments against thieves!"
Folks online chalked it up to the eccentricities of a landlord with too much money for his own good (of which Weibo has seen its share), and #NouveauRicheBaconDrier became a trending topic on Weibo, with people weighing on whether or not sunning vast wealths of pork on your balcony was acceptable.
"I will never understand the world of the 'tuhao' (a recently rich person with poor tastes)," says one Weibo user.
On Chinese social media, anything resembling conspicuous consumption attracts the 'tuhao' tag. Though in this case, the bacon curtain wasn't the act of a newly minted meat mogul gone amok. It's the DIY pork drying rack of a restaurant owner downstairs.
A reporter from Chutian Metropolitan Daily paid the meat curtains a visit and confirmed that the bacons were being sun-dried for the restaurant occupying the floors below. In all, twenty pigs were slaughtered for the bacon wall, yielding four thousand kilograms.
"We can only ensure that our bacon is healthy and free of contaminants if we make them ourselves," said the restaurant's manager. "Wuhai people love to eat Chinese bacon. We're trying to be responsible to our customers."
Bon appetite, y'all.
