A Nanjing Mall Threw a Wedding for Two Cartoon Characters — and Thousands Showed Up

For its 10th anniversary, Nanjing's Jingfeng Center could have done the usual: a ribbon-cutting, some balloons, maybe a tiered cake. Instead, it threw a full-blown wedding — for two cartoon IPs that aren't even from the same universe.

The "Ludicrous Wedding Scene" (
离谱的婚礼现场
), running from July 3 to August 2, marries Xianluo Lipu and Pink Rabbit, two wildly popular Chinese emoji-style character IPs, in what the mall is billing as a "royal union." The pun is baked into the Chinese:
lí pǔ
(厘普) sounds exactly like
lí pǔ
(离谱), meaning "absurd" or "outrageous." The mall ran with it.

And it wasn't a half-hearted photo-op corner, either. Jingfeng built a 400-square-meter outdoor wedding set, complete with ceremony flow, a 10-meter-tall "official announcement" LED screen on the plaza facade, and a processional route from Gate 1 all the way to the altar. Guests — meaning shoppers — were invited to walk the route, pose for photos, and "witness" the ceremony.

On July 9, the actual wedding ceremony took place on-site, with over a dozen IP characters from China and abroad invited as "guests." The mall live-streamed the whole thing on Xiaohongshu, then posted an "extended wedding documentary" afterward so anyone who missed it could relive the day.

Then there's the retail layer. A 200-square-meter pop-up shop houses over 200 IP merchandise items, including more than 100 products debuting nationally for the first time. The framing: purchases are your "wedding gift money" (
随份子
, the traditional Chinese cash-in-red-envelope at weddings). Spend enough and you get themed swag — paper bags, stickers, gold-foil "money," invitations, postcards — while supplies last.

This isn't Jingfeng Center's first rodeo with these IPs. Last year, it ran a "Pretend to Work Company" activation with the same characters, where visitors could cosplay having an office job inside the mall. The wedding is an escalation: same playbook, bigger production, deeper lore. By giving two standalone IPs a shared narrative, the mall created something neither brand could do alone — and made the commercial space feel like a community event rather than a transaction zone.

For global readers, the equivalent might be Hello Kitty and Snoopy getting hitched in a department store, with thousands of fans showing up in person to give "gifts" by buying exclusive collab merch. The scale and commitment are what set it apart: this wasn't a themed corner. It was an immersive, multi-week narrative with its own timeline, its own inside jokes, and its own economy.

The real punchline: it's all for a mall anniversary. No one's celebrating the architecture. They're celebrating a wedding between two rabbits that don't, strictly speaking, exist.