Do you remember when I described the LEGO Monkie Kid set, which some consider the rarest BrickHeadz set? As I proved in that article, it isn’t BrickHeadz. It didn’t take long before I came across a similar case. And once again it’s puzzling, maybe even controversial, and there’s plenty of room for interpretation.
When I described the 6322719: Hangzhou BrickHeadz set, I mentioned that a year later the first anniversary of the store’s opening was celebrated and the figure in question was available again. What I didn’t mention back then is that on that occasion another BrickHeadz-related event took place, and now I’m catching up on that.
Before I start going into the details, though, I have to explain something. It’s very hard to get information about LEGO events in China. There are practically no details in English, so all that’s left is combing the Internet in Chinese, armed with a translator. As you can probably guess, that’s a demanding task for someone who doesn’t know a single word of Chinese and doesn’t understand the characters of their writing system. So the information I’ve gathered is certainly incomplete, and there’s even some risk that I’m twisting or mixing something up somewhere. Please bear with me.
So, in connection with the anniversary described above, there was a new set of figures to be won that looked deceptively like BrickHeadz. The characters in this set were thematically connected with Xu Xian and the Legend of the White Snake. Forgive me for not researching in more detail who these characters are, but it isn’t that easy and at the same time we don’t need it to tell the whole story.
If I understood everything correctly, the set could be obtained in two ways:
1. A draw for 200 customers
2. Winning every weekend between 10 July and 1 August
The draw took place among the store’s customers who had made purchases there. I don’t know when the promotion started, but it looks like it was before the official celebrations, so before 10 July. The first 200 customers who made purchases of at least 99 yuan had a chance to win. They drew lucky balls which were supposed to contain a slip of paper saying “Congratulations on your win”, and that was supposed to guarantee the set. And here’s the catch: it looks like only 3 sets were available to win this way.
You’ll now ask what you had to do to have a chance of winning every weekend. It looks like you could sign up to build these figures, and whoever built them first won. However, you could only build one figure, so you’d have to take part in the competition twice to win both figures. For Xu Xian the best time was reportedly 14 minutes and 10 seconds, and the record time for the second figure was 14 minutes and 45 seconds. The competition was held 9 times in total, according to the dates and times written on the board you can see below. I don’t know whether each time there was one competition or several, and I also don’t know whether you could choose which figure you built or whether it was assigned in advance. Or maybe everyone who fitted within some maximum time won?
What else I managed to establish is that only 20 people could take part in each session and the minimum age was 10. Sign-ups were made online via the store’s WeChat. In a few places the price of the set was also mentioned, given as 156.58 yuan. I don’t know whether that means the set could be bought or whether it was simply marketing information about how much LEGO values these figures at.
Everything indicates that it was definitely better to win the figures in the building competition, because it looks like the figures given away in the draw were glued together 🙁
Both figures were built from original LEGO bricks, without any additional printed bricks or stickers.
Instructions were also available, but there’s a lot of uncertainty here. It’s really very hard for me to understand the information I found, and I no longer know myself whether the PDF was available officially or put together by fans from photos they took. Because it’s certain that the instructions were available in the store. This article describes the steps for getting these instructions, but that required using WeChat and it’s certainly no longer valid, so I didn’t get hold of these files.
Let’s now come back to the question of whether this is a BrickHeadz set. Firstly, it doesn’t exist in any official database. Of course that doesn’t prove anything yet, especially since I’ve already found out several times that there is a big barrier between the Western and the Chinese Internet and information doesn’t get through so easily. And I don’t mean technical restrictions and blocks here at all. China simply has its own popular portals, which operate on a larger scale only in their country, and at the same time the language barrier plays a huge role.
Secondly, I haven’t seen the BrickHeadz logo appear anywhere on any materials.
Thirdly, China is a somewhat isolated market, but at the same time it’s huge and plays by its own rules. I suspect many events are organised there and many LEGO sets are released that we don’t know about, because they aren’t even within our circle of interest. That’s the case here too, after all: the characters in this set are probably known to every Chinese person, but outside their country they’re practically anonymous. So nobody in Europe or the USA would take an interest in such a set. A huge LEGO factory was built in China, and there is also an independent team of designers there. Of course I don’t know the details, but that’s how the press materials I came across present it. And it’s precisely this team, in collaboration with the LEGO Store in Hangzhou, that designed the figures in question. So we can assume that they are official LEGO products.
To sum up, the set shown here is certainly official, since it came from the hands of LEGO designers, but despite its form being a twin of BrickHeadz, it isn’t a set from our favourite series.
The photos and information I found come mainly from this article and generally from the posts.careerengine.us website.