Romance by numbers: Chinese girl's lonely heart advert attracts mob

When Zhang Mengqian announced that she was looking for a boyfriend on a "wish wall" at her university in south-west China, she must have been hoping that she'd get a few eligible responses. All potential suitors had to do, her message said, was complete a couple of simple tasks – turn up outside her dorm building on a certain date and time and shout her name. Imagine her surprise then, when she looked down from her window at the appointed hour to find a scene more akin to a football crowd than the tender balcony moment from Romeo and Juliet. Her message had touched the hearts – or something – of not just a few potential suitors, but thousands. Perhaps the enormous response was entirely predictable. The University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu, Sichuan province, has a male to female ratio of 25:1. Mengqian had announced her search for love as part of the university's "girls' day". Each female student was given a blank card and asked to write their wish and place it on the wall. Of the thousands of young men who made the effort of turning up, however, surprisingly only a few were brave enough to complete the last part of her challenge and shout out Mengqian's name.