Palace Museum Taobao turns emperors into memes — cultural-product revenue hits ¥1.5B

Palace Museum Taobao, the online shop and social accounts of Beijing's Forbidden City, spent its first years selling ordinary tourist souvenirs. Then, around 2013, it flipped to a deliberately cute, meme-like voice — and turned China's most solemn institution into its most beloved internet brand.

The turning point was 1 Aug 2014: a WeChat post titled 'Yongzheng: I feel so cute' animated classical court paintings so the emperor lounged, joked and acted silly, paired with internet slang; it flooded WeChat Moments and became the account's first 100,000-read post. Emperors became recurring characters — on fans reading 'I really miss you', on edict-printed tape, and in the 'Cold Palace' fridge magnet that fans had proposed in Weibo banter with Haier.

The products were deliberately everyday: phone stands, fans, tape, fridge magnets — the joke was the design. Director Shan Jixiang explained the shift as studying how people live and mining cultural resources to meet daily life, rather than mechanically copying artifacts; the museum had to earn 46% of its own budget, so the meme also had to sell.

Results: revenue from cultural products grew from ¥600M in 2013 to nearly ¥1B in 2016 and ¥1.5B in 2017 — more than 1,500 A-share companies' annual revenue. A one-hour 2015 promotion sold 1,500 phone stands and logged 16,000 orders in a day; Palace-themed QQ emojis saw nearly 40M uses in under a month; and the accounts became a benchmark for museum branding in China.