Security :: Use .htaccess To Redirect Chinese Hacking Attempts?

My server (CentOS 5.4) is being bombarded 24x7 with IP addresses from China trying to exploit phpMyAdmin. For every one I block on the firewall, half a dozen come to the funeral! It's a pity these morons don't have something better to occupy their time. I'm getting page after page of this (see below) every day and it's been going on for weeks. I don't even have phpMyAdmin on the server. I don't use it and I deleted it.

I've read that you can use .htaccess and / or mod_rewrite to redirect / block them based on any query for phpMyAdmin (they try all letters in upper and lower case, leading to page after page). Unfortunately, I have no idea of how to do this. I already have an .htaccess file. Maybe someone can suggest what to add to stop these pests from wasting my bandwidth and suggest somewhere I could redirect them to to cause them maximum problems. I don't want to block the entire country, seems a bit like overkill, not all Chinese are morons. we aren't even in the USA, so why they are doing this is beyond me.

A TINY sample!
[Sun Aug 08 13:29:08 2010] [error] [client 61.191.41.53] File does not exist: /var/www/corp/phpMyAdmin-2.7.2

[code]...