Even without holiday leave, 11.11 Chinese Bachelor Festival is a vogue among single college students and young white-collars.

Bachelors are called guang gun (光棍) in Chinese, meaning “bald sticks”. This is why Chinese youth picked November 11th, represented by four ones, as a special date for single people.

I just found an article published three years ago on People’s Daily Online, which said 40 percent of interviewees attribute their single status to a “growing self-consciousness among the young [that] has raised the bar for selecting the other half.”

However, on the evening of Bachelor Day, people get desperate no matter how high the bar has been raised in their minds. Turning frogs to princes was their primary goal last night, just like these 1,600 young people gathered for a collective blind date in Shenzhen’s Happy Valley.