Tencent’s Quirky, Accidental Mascot Turns 10

Most mascots begin with a brief: a document setting out who the character is, what they stand for, which adjectives apply. But when marketing teams start running low on ideas, some odd characters can result — with Long Penguin the most notorious.

Long Penguin never got a brief. What he got instead was ten years of moments nobody planned, and a team who found him funny enough to keep going.

Here is the whole thing, head to feet.

A team was stuck when trying to come up with an idea to mark the Mid-Autumn Festival, an annual holiday in China that brings families together. In middle of a meeting, someone drew Tencent’s penguin mascot with a ridiculously long bird — the kind of thing you draw when you’ve run out of good ideas and start entertaining bad ones. In Chinese, the team jokingly called it 长鹅 (cháng é, literally “long penguin”). When said aloud in Chinese, it sounds like the moon goddess at the heart of the Mid-Autumn legend. No one knew that would become the beginning of Chang’e’s long history.

For four years he lived in group chats. Employees slipped him into their own festival greetings, redrew him badly, passed him around. No marketing budget, no media push — just pure organic momentum.

Someone finally built him at scale: an inflatable that’s more than two meters tall that greeted employees and passers-by outside Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters. A place — and a size — that made it impossible to miss. We then released 200 plush versions which sold out overnight.

Long Penguin now has a permanent place in Tencent lore. The company releases the official plush toy every year, each about 10 centimeters taller than the last. Fans track it, argue about it, and bet on the number before it is announced.

A typhoon was scheduled to roll into Shenzhen in 2020, so facilities staff used ropes to prevent him from becoming the first ever flying penguin.

Long Penguin has since became a canvas for fresh jokes, wild ideas, and unexpected turns, which cement him as the lovable character he is today. But the most unusual thing about him is he never had to sell a product, technology, or business. Long Penguin keeps evolving simply because it’s fun—and because people can’t wait to see what he does next.