Craw-ning glory

With his face smeared in spicy red crawfish sauce, New Yorker Jon E Liong learned that setting a new world record in rural China can be a tough, but fun, crawfish to crack. "It's quite a small reward for such a large investment," he joked, referring to the time it takes to dig out the tiny chunk of flesh from the exoskeletons of these baby lobster look-alikes. "But it sure tastes good."

The 29-year-old Chinese American was in Xuyi county, Jiangsu province, along with an estimated 30,000 Chinese and several dozen foreigners to establish a Guinness World Record in terms of number of people eating crawfish (xiaolongxia) in a single sitting.

As they spilled a mountain of freakishly long red claws and a sea of beer over the town square to inaugurate the 9th Xuyi International Crawfish Festival, part of a local tourism and industry drive that is hitting warp speed this summer, officials said the gambit had worked.