The Amateur Collector here bringing you some interesting collectables from Asia!
Five months ago it was Spring Festival here in China (more commonly known as Chinese New Year in the Western world), and with it all sorts of stores, products and services had promotions going on for the Year of the Horse. One that caught my eye was by Kinder Bueno.
Kinder is famous for its Kinder Surprise line of chocolates; a chocolate egg with a small collectable toy in it, with several to collect. But surprisingly it was their Kinder Bueno line that had a collectable promotion going on for Chinese New Year. In the supermarket I came across boxes with Bueno bars in them and a horse keychain titled... well I'm not too sure, sadly my Chinese character reading is very limited (feel free to comment below what the box says if you know!)
Anyway, here is a picture of some of the keychains (two out the box and one still in packaging):
The right hand horse is "乱码“ (luanma), which according to online dictionaries is a 'disorganised coding of text'. It's also a play on words, with "luanma" sounding like (乱马) which I think means "Confused Horse" or "Messy Horse", which is why it has all this jumbled writing on it as well as a look of confusion on its face.
The one on the left hand side is "二维码" (erweima) which is a 2-D code, with the "码/马" play on words also being used here.
The one in the box is named “神马” (shenma) which I would translates roughly as "Holy Horse" or "Divine Horse", but according to nciku 神 could as well be "immortal", "god", "absolute", or more (I guess that explains why it has a halo in the picture below!)
The back of the box showing all the keychains to be collected.
Currently I own four of these, the only one I'm currently missing is the 'merry-go-round' horse (i.e. the pink one). The store didn't have this one in stock and I couldn't find any other stores that had this promotion going on. It's been months now and these collectables are discontinued, Spring Festival has been over for a while now after all! My only other hope to get my hands on that pink one is either through ebay or via someone on here. If anyone knows where I can find the missing keychain or has one to sell or trade let me know! Contact me either through my blog here or on my youtube account The Amateur Collector.
I find these keychains adorable, highly stylised and highly collectable (just look at how unique each one is from one another) and just an overall a good idea for a promotion - not to mention they came with delicious Kinder Bueno! Well done Kinder!
Keep tuned folks, I have more dinosaur, collectable and Pokémon related stuff to show!
Till next time!
