Quest for supremacy leads China to uncover the biggest breasts

TERESA POOLE

Peking

China's latest claim to world supremacy was announced by the official news agency Xinhua yesterday - "China-girl-huge breasts" flashed the headline. "Twelve-year-old girl sprouts gargantuan breasts," it added. The breasts are "much larger than ones of an African woman recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records", it revealed.

China regularly likes to remind the rest of the world that it boasts the biggest (population), oldest (civilisation) and longest (Great Wall). There is also the matter of the "four inventions" - gunpowder, the compass, papermaking and printing. It even claims to have invented golf. So it probably only a matter of time before China would uncover the largest breasts.

Just why Peking thought it necessary or helpful to identify Ting Jiafen and broadcast her condition was not clear yesterday. But Xinhua spared no blushes: "Each breast of Ting Jiafen, of Changba village, Gudong Township, Pingtang County, has grown to dimensions of 48cm long and 30cm high, weighing about 10kg," it reported. She has had to quit school and is undergoing hospital treatment in Guizhou, one of China's poorest provinces.

Ting Jiafen's mother, Chen Guoxia, explained: "Her breasts began to grow last February, and they were as large as fists by May, getting bigger and bigger afterwards." Xinhua added that "doctors said there is no difference between Ting's breasts and those of ordinary women, except for their huge size".

The doctors have perceptively diagnosed the problem as an "abnormal structure of the mammary glands". Medical care in China's poor inland provinces is usually extremely basic and, since the demise of the commune system, it has also been expensive for peasants.

All in all, Ting Jiafen has had her share of ill health. According to Xinhua, she was ill in 1993 and lost the ability to walk, but was later cured "through taking calcium pills". Then she suffered blindness from May to June last year, but recovered without treatment.