A Chinese migrant who was too poor to buy a train ticket but determined to make it home for the Lunar New Year cycled more than 300 miles – before realising he was going in the wrong direction.

The migrant had been travelling for 30 days after setting off from his workplace in the eastern Shandong province, believing he was heading north on a 1,000 mile journey towards his home in Heilongjiang.

But the man had actually been travelling south and was stopped by traffic police for cycling on a motorway in China’s central-eastern province of Anhui when he was 310 miles off course.