熊猫头xióng māo tóu

熊猫 is “panda” and 头 is “head”. The panda is only the frame. The joke is the face inside it, usually a wild laugh or a blank stare, and the caption, which says what the sender would not say politely.

Anyone can make one. You put a face and a line of text on the panda, and a sticker app does the rest, so there is a 熊猫头 for almost every situation.

It is a classic and still in use. New 熊猫头 stickers appear for each new meme, and sticker apps let you make your own with any caption. In a group of friends it is friendly teasing. With a teacher or a boss, use a normal emoji.

No one is sure who made the first one. Moegirl says the panda is a simple line drawing from an ad, and that someone pasted the laughing face known as 金馆长, from a Korean film, onto it and posted it in QQ groups, where it spread fast.

Know Your Meme estimates that it appeared around 2010, perhaps on the rage-comic site 暴走漫画, and traces the panda to a TV ad for a cheese brand. Other faces followed, from wrestlers to film actors.

It became a standard weapon of 斗图, “sticker battles”: in QQ groups and on Baidu Tieba, people answered each other only with pictures. In March 2023 the stickers also took off on English-language Twitter.