Nobody turns his nose up at this lucky piggery

With the Year of the Pig in the Chinese zodiac approaching around the corner, hogs raised in Shangtangjie, a village in Taizhou's Xianju county, are probably the luckiest herd in the nation, living a carefree life in a pigpen ringed by fragrant flowers.

The 800-sq-m collective cottage where 80 pigs are kept recently went viral on the Internet as tourists gasped with admiration for the clean and fragrant piggery, with flowers growing around it.

This is in sharp contrast with the squalid, foul-smelling scene seven years ago, when each household in the village let their swine roam free around their houses. "During the summer days, it just stank, with flies buzzing everywhere," recalled Xu Zibing, Party secretary of the village in Zhejiang province.