You would not want to be late for Mr Wang Sijun's class.

To discipline frequent latecomers, the professor who teaches at the Chengdu College of University of Electronic Science and Technology in China's Sichuan province came up with the unusual punishment of making them pen a horribly complicated Chinese character 1,000 times.

The character, pronounced "biang", is made up of at least 56 strokes and has its origins in a noodle dish popular in the north-western province of Shaanxi.

Known as biang biang noodles and typically eaten by commoners, it gained nationwide fame in February 2014 when China President Xi Jinping was spotted tucking into a bowl during a visit his hometown of Xi'an, Shaanxi's capital city.

According to local media, Mr Wang was inspired by the noodles after a trip to Shaanxi earlier this month.

The penalty has been meted out to two students thus far - with interesting results.

The first, a female student surnamed Cheng, said it was too tiring to continue after writing it 200 times. She asked for a different punishment and promised Mr Wang she would never be late for class again.



Sheets of the Chinese character "biang" written by student Ms Cheng, who gave up after writing it 200 times. PHOTO: CCTVNEWS/FACEBOOK



Instead of even attempting to write the character, the second student, Zhou Feng offered to draw one hundred terracotta warriors instead, a task he took two hours to complete.

Mr Wang's novel punishment has since gone viral, with netizens on micro-blogging platform Weibo sharing the character and praising him for being creative.

In March, another Chinese character took the spotlight. Pronounced "duang", it was formed using a combination of actor Jackie Chan's name.