This Monday, an annual chilli pepper festival kicked off in central China's spice-loving Hunan province with a chilli-eating contest. The winner set a blistering pace by downing 50 flaming hot peppers in just over a minute.
With doctors on hand just in case, ten contestants each held plates heaped with 50 Tabasco chilli peppers, racing to be the first to finish off the red-hot fruits.
Tang Shuaihui took home a 3-gramme 24-karat gold coin for winning the competition, which is put on by a local theme park in the county of Ningxiang and is now in its second year.
Tang cleared his plate in just 68 seconds in a contest held in near sweltering temperature weather and as competitors sat in a shallow pool filled with water and three tonnes of floating chillies.
Two fanatical contestants in the 'chili pool'
"He finished them at an amazing speed, barely after the emcee had finished speaking," said Sun Minying, an employee at the theme park.
The Tabasco pepper has a ranking of 30,000-50,000 on the Scoville Heat Scale that measures the piquancy of chillies, which puts it somewhere between a jalapeno and a habanero.
According to ecns.cn, the peppers bobbing in the pool, however, were of a far weaker variety, partly to avoid irritating the contestants' skin.