表情包biǎo qíng bāo

Reaction stickers

lái, dòu tú!来，斗图！Bring it on: sticker battle!

表情包 are the reaction pictures people send in Chinese chats instead of words: a cartoon face, an animal or a film still, usually with a short caption. The word means “expression pack”.

Took off: 2014
Started in: QQ and WeChat chats
Today: Now everyday Chinese

What it means

表情 means a facial expression, and a 表情包 is a pack of them. People also call a single sticker a 表情包.

Unlike emoji, anyone can make one: crop a picture, add a line of text, send it. Most are saved from other people’s chats rather than downloaded, Chinese Wikipedia notes.

They soften a message, answer empty praise or end a conversation politely. A Guangming Daily essay points out that a sticker’s smile does not mean the sender is smiling.

How people use it

It is everyday Chinese. You 发表情包, “send a sticker”, in almost any chat. Some sets belong to an age group: bright greeting pictures with flowers and blessings are 中老年表情包, “stickers for the middle-aged and elderly”, and young people send them as a joke.

亮亮

明天早上八点开会
míng tiān zǎo shang bā diǎn kāi huì
Meeting at eight tomorrow morning.
收到
shōu dào
Got it.
等等，我找一个表情包
děng děng, wǒ zhǎo yí gè biǎo qíng bāo
Wait, let me find a sticker.
[Sticker] a hand-drawn grinning face sticker
不用了，你已经发了五个
bú yòng le, nǐ yǐ jīng fā le wǔ gè
No need. You’ve already sent five.

More examples

他不回我消息，只发了一个表情包。
tā bù huí wǒ xiāo xi, zhǐ fā le yí gè biǎo qíng bāo.
He didn’t answer my message. He just sent a sticker.
我手机里存了一千多个表情包。
wǒ shǒu jī lǐ cún le yì qiān duō gè biǎo qíng bāo.
I have over a thousand stickers saved on my phone.

Where it came from

Chinese Wikipedia traces the habit to QQ, which added a set of chat expressions in its 2003 version. A Tencent report counted more than 533.8 billion QQ expressions sent in 2014.

Some trace the picture style to rage comics, known in China as 暴走漫画, which appeared in 2007 and gave people faces to caption and reuse.

People collected their favorites for years. Each new upload to QQ or Baidu Tieba compressed them again, until they turned blurry or greenish, which fans call 电子包浆, “digital patina”, Gcores wrote in 2018.

Sticker battles, 斗图, became a pastime: two people trade stickers to outdo each other. By 2015 there were apps for making them quickly, Chinese Wikipedia notes.

A QQ sticker panel full of hand-drawn reaction stickers: a round, grinning line-drawn face that waves, cries, eats and rides a bike, with tabs for other sticker sets — The original meme image. Screenshot of the QQ chat sticker panel with the user-made 比尔德 sticker set; via Moegirlpedia. Source

Sources

Chinese Wikipedia: 表情包 (in Chinese) (zh.wikipedia.org)
Guangming Daily on The Paper: WeChat stickers, July 2020 (in Chinese) (m.thepaper.cn)
Gcores: blurry old stickers, August 2018 (in Chinese) (gcores.com)

Checked November 2026. The picture at the top is our own drawing of 灯灯. The original meme image belongs to its owner and is shown to explain the meme. To ask us to remove it, write to legal@dengdeng.app.