China’s suicide rate is among the highest in the world. Moreover, it may well lead the world in bizzarre suicides. Earlier this year, two school girls in Fujian Province drowned themselves believing that they were set to go time travelling.

At one point, spectacular and public suicides became so common that Beijing stepped in.

A Shenzhen man has failed to become part of that tradition, but got lots of publicity along the way.

The man climbed the arched ceiling of Shenzhen’s Mumianwan subway station and tried to commit suicide by jumping off on July 29th, causing the service of Metro line 3 from Yitian to Shuanglong to shut down for an hour, according to local media.

After police spent four hours trying to talk him down, the man dressed in a pink t-shirt, finally jumped off at 7:30 in the evening and fell onto an air-cushion that the fireman had laid down. Upon landing, he was quicky seized by police.

From around 4 p.m. that day, passengers were complaining on Weibo that metro line 3 was not moving and somebody had even passed out aboard a train. A large amount of passengers were forced to get off and got held up in stations.

The Longgang metro line resumed normal operation at 5:07 p.m.

Outside the station there was also chaos. The rescuers laid out a huge life-saving air-cushion at 4 p.m., which occupied three of the four lanes on the section outside the Mumianwan station, causing the air to be filled with the sound of beeping horns for miles around.

Up above, the man began to do some dangerous moves on the roof, walking back and forth, stretching and crouching. At 5:30 p.m., he sat down and started twiddling with his thumbs. According to a witness, the guy entered the railway track area at around 3 p.m. and initially tried to throw himself in front of a train.

At around 6:30 p.m., two firemen took a scalding ladder up there but their attempts to take him down proved fruitless. At 7:30 p.m., four hours after he had ascended the roof, the man suddenly jumped backward in a Y shape with his arms overhead. He landed on the edge of the air-cushion and rolled over onto the street.

The cause of why he did what he did is still being investigated.

You can watch the incident in the latest Nanfang TV.