The strangest things seized by Hong Kong and Chinese customs: diamonds in his shoes, snakes in stockings and 40-year-old meat

Customs officials on the Hong Kong-China border regularly find everything from drugs to cigarettes to illicit fuel. Sometimes, they come across something different. Here are five weird things smugglers have tried to get through

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Customs officers caught this woman trying to smuggle 102 iPhones and 15 Tissot watches out of Hong Kong.

Published: 6:46pm, 10 Jul 2018Updated: 6:47pm, 10 Jul 2018

On Monday, Chinese authorities arrested a Hong Kong driver for attempting to smuggle HK$11.9 million (US$1.5 million) worth of gold across the Hong Kong-China border. While not an everyday occurrence, it was far from being the strangest contraband seized by Hong Kong customs officers or their colleagues on the other side, in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. We look back at five unusual items intercepted:

A Hong Kong driver was arrested last year for trying to smuggle 44kg of gold bars.

1. Snakes in stockings

Last year, customs officers in Luohu, Shenzhen foiled a man’s attempt to smuggle in four live snakes from Hong Kong. The four endangered reptiles were hidden in stockings. Bringing reptiles into China isn’t illegal. However, import and quarantine certificates are required.

Officers seized 160,000 kilos of frozen meat, some of which dated back to the 1970s. Photo: Dickson Lee

2. Frozen meat from the 1970s

This isn’t fictitious. In 2015, a joint operation between Hong Kong and Chinese authorities intercepted a network, using Hong Kong as a point of transit to smuggle frozen meat to Vietnam with packing labels dating back as far as the 1970s.