A Journey Into the Heart of Labubu

The day after I failed to secure a Labubu from Pop Mart’s original store, I decide to console myself with a visit to Pop Land, the company’s 10-acre theme park in central Beijing—and perhaps the clearest sign that it intends to come for Disney’s lunch. (“Our art toys are like Disney’s movies,” Wang says in A Company One of a Kind. “They use movies to reach consumers, cultivate fans, and build IP and fan communities. We do it through art toys.”)

Pop Land is about 1 percent the size of Universal Studios in Beijing and Shanghai’s Disneyland, but unlike other theme parks, it sits right by the consulate district and a few subway stops away from Beijing’s most populous business areas. It’s in a city green space, which meant that Pop Mart wasn’t allowed to move even a single tree. Instead, the company renovated an abandoned building on the property and named it Molly’s Castle. A leafy area became Labubu Adventure Forest, though it looks much brighter and more kid-friendly than Lung’s original depiction. At one end of the forest, actors put on a “Warriors Training Camp” in full-size Labubu suits.

I stop for lunch at the park’s restaurant, on the third floor of Molly’s Castle. The minute I’m seated at a table and inform the waitress I came alone, she puts a 23-inch-tall plush doll in the chair opposite me. My dining buddy is Zimomo, the male chief of the Labubu clan in the original children’s book and one of the rarest Pop Mart products sold. Throughout my lunch, other Pop Land visitors keep coming over to ask whether I bought the Zimomo doll myself and if they can take a picture of it. I feel like I’m dining with a celebrity.

Dining with Zimomo, a chieftain from the original Story of Puca book.

Video: Zeyi Yang

At the table next to me is a mother with her young daughter. I ask what brought them here. The mom tells me that her daughter, who’s turning 4 in less than a month, found and fell in love with Labubu through watching videos on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. She thought about buying two Zimomo dolls for her daughter, but they cost $200 each on the resale market, so she’s still debating. Just the day before, she saw on social media that a friend’s daughter had a Labubu-themed birthday party, where the room was stuffed with dozens of rare Labubus. She shows me videos of the party on her phone. “Her mom paid a lot to get these,” she says.

Since I began my own Labubu hunt, I’ve known the option exists to go to a reseller, often referred to in China by the slang term huangniu (literally “yellow ox”). I heard from Dong, a Pop Mart customer since 2018 in Shanghai, that many huangniu he knows use bots that monitor social media for restock announcements and grab new merchandise the millisecond it drops. Dong has paid a small amount to join group chats where huangniu release early information. He calls himself a fenniu now—between a fan and a huangniu. He has already collected most of the Labubu products ever released, so he’s only buying new ones to sell to other fans for a profit. (Which, to me, sounds like he is a huangniu.)