Zeng Yaxin paints anime onto jianbing — Chengdu queues five hours at her stall

Zeng Yaxin, a post-1995 art-school graduate who had taught at education-training companies, got the idea while browsing Chengdu's lively night markets, where plain jianbing competed only on price. She practised at home for over a month before opening her stall at the Funing night market in August 2025.

Make the jianbing grill a canvas: paint a customer's chosen anime or idol character on each pancake with chocolate outlines and fruit-juice colours, priced by complexity.

She draws the character's outline with chocolate, fills it with egg and milk batter, and uses vegetable and fruit juices as paint. Plain pancakes sell for ¥15 and ¥25, while custom orders are priced by complexity — a fan paid ¥65 for a portrait of her favourite singer — with each design taking 10 to 30 minutes. Her husband handles logistics, and the stall caps orders at 60 numbered tickets a night.

Customers began queuing from early afternoon for the 5pm opening and waited up to five hours; many photographed every flip of the pancake, and some said they could not bear to eat the finished art. Daily revenue passed ¥1,000, the stall went viral across Chinese social media in October 2025, and Zeng earned the nickname 'human printer'.

Chengdu's Funing night market is full of jianbing stalls selling the same paper-thin savoury pancakes at the same few yuan, so Zeng Yaxin never planned to win on price. An art-school graduate who had worked as a teacher in education-training companies, she had a different asset: she could draw.

Her stall, opened in August 2025 after more than a month of secret practice at home, paints customers' favourite anime characters, singers and mascots onto pancakes. Chocolate draws the outline, egg and milk fill the body, and vegetable and fruit juices provide the colours — all cooked live on the griddle while customers film the reveal.

The pricing follows the craft, not the food: plain pancakes cost ¥15 and ¥25, while custom portraits are priced by complexity, with one customer paying ¥65 for a singer's likeness. A simple design takes about ten minutes and a complex one around half an hour, so the stall limits itself to 60 numbered tickets a night and works from 5pm until nearly midnight.

Demand became the story. Customers arrived from early afternoon to secure numbers, some waited five hours, and onlookers called her a 'human printer'. Fans joked that the pancakes had created a new career path for art graduates, and the stall went viral across Chinese social media in October 2025.

Zeng turned a personal skill — drawing — into the product itself, where competitors had only price to compete on.

Custom orders priced by complexity let the craft carry a premium ordinary street food never sees.

Capping orders at 60 made scarcity visible and turned waiting into part of the experience.

The live reveal, filmed by customers, made every pancake an advertisement on social media.

Starting small in a busy night market gave her real demand data before any larger commitment.

A skill everyone treats as a hobby can become the product: when the craft is visibly rare, customers queue for the experience and the price stops being about the food.

The stall stayed busy after its October 2025 viral moment. In a November follow-up with Red Star News, Zeng described her path — art teacher, a civil-service attempt, after-sales work — and said she kept returning to drawing because she cannot leave it, no artist but an ordinary person devoted to what she loves. Her husband said the couple was considering a mini-programme booking system so customers would not travel for nothing, planning a Monday rest, and possibly hiring art-background staff to expand. Chinese media cited the stall as an example of craft-led night-market entrepreneurship.