Sweet-toothed Chinese will soon be twisting, licking, and dunking six new flavors of Oreo cookies, including Chaozhou-style barbecued-pork pastry and honey red-bean cake, reminiscent of traditional snacks once consumed by the country’s dynastic royalty.
At midnight Wednesday, the company is set to release the treats on e-commerce platform Tmall as part of a collaboration with Beijing’s Palace Museum, which is housed inside the historic Forbidden City complex. The four other cookie varieties are spicy and fragrant peppercorn puff, lychee-scented rose cake, fragrant green-tea cake, and traditional hawthorn.
Hype for the sweets ramped up on social media Wednesday following the debut of an animated promo video showing the Forbidden City reconstructed with Oreos, with a hashtag translating to “Oreo enters the Forbidden City” garnering over 340 million views on microblogging platform Weibo by that afternoon.
The Palace Museum has undertaken various promotional initiatives in recent years, helping to make the Forbidden City into a social media star. In December, the museum began offering lipsticks inspired by ancient Chinese porcelain and jewelry, among other makeup products. (Image: 奥利奥 on WeChat)










