Has Guinness Found A New World’s Smallest Man?

Some honors are dubious indeed. For Huang Kaiquan, a forty-year-old man, living with his mother in a village in southwestern China, the title of world’s smallest man seems well within reach.

Huang is a former actor/magician who stands just less than two feet, six inches, which is only 1.4 cm (about half an inch) higher than the former world’s shortest man, He Pingping, who was 29 inches tall. Pingping died of chest problems last March at the age of 21 while filming a television program in Italy for the Guinness Book of Records.

In Sanjiang village, they call Huang, “Short Brother,” and it is estimated that his height and weight is equivalent to that of an average three year-old child.

“He didn’t grow at all until about one month after birth. We thought it was just late development and didn’t pay enough attention. When Huang was three, he still wore the clothes of a one-year-old. It was then we noticed his unusualness,” said his mother, Cheng Fuxiu.

Born in 1970, Huang is the second child and only son in the family, all the other members of which are of normal stature. One consolation for this accident of birth that has caused him much anguish and torment throughout his life is that even at the age of forty, his mother can still pick him up in her arms and cuddle him.

“People have always mistaken me for a toddler because of my height and now that I am going bald, I look even more like a baby,” joked Huang to the press.

Huang’s parents refused to abandon him and brought him to hospitals where no one was able to help him. When Huang was six and the father of the family died, it was extremely difficult for Cheng to make enough money by herself to feed her family, but she did it.

“ He has always been a good boy… he sweeps the floors and helps whenever he can,” said Cheng.