POVERTY isn't funny.

So let's just pretend these people actually hail from one of Shandong Province's more well-to-do villages and aren't really so desperate for gas that they'd risk life and limb to carry it home in a 6m long plastic bag.

Okay, that's not working. Let's just say the pictures are "amazing".

The village in question is Binzhou in China's east and the gas they're bagging up is usually reserved for running extraction machinery.

According to Chinasmack, the workers say the middle-aged woman in the pictures here "skillfully opened the valve to the gas and connected it to the bag she was carrying, the plastic bag quickly rose and grew to be a 6 meter long, 1 meter wide balloon".

"After about 4 minutes the bag was full."

Workers at the oil field say they try to talk the villagers out of the dangerous practice, but to no avail.

According to one commentor, officials usually turn a blind eye to villagers connecting their own lines to oil pipes in the district, but that's not the case in Binzhou.

So they take the gas instead. A bag this size, according to another commentor, would burn for five days.

We'll leave it to you to figure out exactly how you would connect a six-metre bag of gas to anything that might burn it safely.

Unless you're an OH&S official, in which case you're probably clutching at your chest and scrabbling through your files for the Witnessed a Traumatic Photo on the Internet form.