Photo: Screenshot of online video

A tenant in Suzhou, East China's Jiangsu Province, was surprised to find a special "housewarming gift" hidden in the closet of her new apartment - a mortar that could blow up at any minute and was powerful enough to flatten the entire floor. 

The tenant, surnamed Hu, found a plastic bag in a closet as she was moving in to her new apartment. Inside it was a cannonball-shaped object 30 centimeters in length, with a round head and a tail. She immediately called in the police to check it out. 

When police arrived, they identified the rusty, mud-covered object as a mortar, which could very likely still be detonated, and was powerful enough to flatten the entire floor or even bring down the wall of the building. 

Residents were quickly told to evacuate the building. "No need to panic," said the police, "We just found a mortar upstairs, and you can come back inside once we have dealt with it."

A specialist team was dispatched to the scene and took the mortar away. "Judging from its appearance, the mortar might have been picked up from the riverside and kept as a souvenir by the former tenants without knowing what it was," police explained.