Bags of mountain air brought to smoggy Chinese city of Zhengzhou

The air pollution is so bad in one Chinese city that a travel company ran a promotion over the weekend shipping bags of mountain air into the city to give residents a chance to breathe fresh-tasting oxygen.

Twenty bags containing air from Laojun Mountain were shipped 120 miles to Zhengzhou, the capital of central China’s Henan province.

Residents were limited to a few minutes of inhaling after waiting in line to breathe in the air.

“I felt my baby move right when I breathed in," an eight-months pregnant woman surnamed Sun told the China News Service. "I would love to walk in the mountain's forests after my child is born.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Zhengzhou’s Air Quality Index on Monday was an unhealthy 158. The AQI for the most-polluted city in the U.S., Bakersfield, Calif., was 45 on Monday.

In addition to boosting tourism at Laojun Mountain, the promotion also hoped to raise public awareness of environmental protection, according to mountain manager Xu Lei.

[Wall Street Journal] [China News Service]