Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2024 March 7

= March 7 =

CAAC Souvenir
I have been asked to identify the source of a souvenir. It is a small baby in a blanket. When you press down the baby's head, it makes a squeak sound. It is in a hand-made cardboard box with a CAAC sticker on top. I recognize the sticker with the CAAC logo and the name in both Chinese and the English letters CAAC at the bottom. But, I have no idea what a squeaking baby has to do with an airline. The assumption is that it comes from the late 60s or early 70s. If it helps, the bag also has a pair of Wuxi clay figurines in a similar hand-made cardboard box. I have a photo of the baby and the label, but I don't know how to add them here. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 15:52, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Presumably you're talking about CAAC (airline). For uploading pictures, one option is something called Imgur. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:35, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Given how annoyed some passengers get with a wailing baby on board, one would expect that an airline will try to avoid an association with squeaking babies, just like the inflight entertainment system does not serve up airplane disaster movies, or even the comedy flick Airplane!. Do you have an indication that the box and the souvenir are connected, beyond that the box may have happened to be around when the person in possession of the souvenir needed a box to store it? Could the box perhaps originally also have contained figurines? Or might it perhaps also be an accidental container for stuff not connected to the airline. --Lambiam 19:38, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I do not have a lot of information. These belonged to a couple who died in Framingham over 20 years ago. They traveled internationally in the 50s and 60s a great deal, but appear to have traveled less so in the 70s. I have no indication that they ever visited China. There are two boxes, both made of the same blue-printed card stock. They are hand-made because they are not squared off and the material is not cut straight. One has a very common Wuxi clay figurine set. I identified it quickly. It is factory made, not handmade. The baby is the hard one. It is a baby in a swaddling blanket. Basically, a baby head on a push rod inside a bucket painted to look like a baby blanket. Press down on the head and it goes into the bucket and makes a squeak noise. The Wuxi figurines have, in English, "Wuxi Clay" on the box. The baby has a CAAC sticker with the CAAC logo. Because the couple who owned it died in Framingham, I am beginning to suspect that they purchased it in China town in Boston or someplace similar. It is easy to find examples of Wuxi figurines. I have had no luck identifying the baby. 75.136.148.8 (talk) 21:14, 7 March 2024 (UTC)
 * OR— CAAC was handing out other kinds of souvenirs well into the 1980s. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 10:22, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
 * https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/ has 2.7 million members Polygnotus (talk) 11:05, 10 March 2024 (UTC)
 * I think this might well be correct. CAAC also ran the airports and Chinese airports routinely have souvenir shops. It's very plausible that they would have sold a wide range of branded goods in such shops, since air travel was still a luxury brand at that time. Matt's talk 21:31, 15 March 2024 (UTC)
 * The baby is probably something to do with Christmas. Are you able to insert the Chinese characters, as they would have more meaning than 4 letters? Are they "中國民航" for the airline? But the box may be nothing to do with the contents ass mentioned by Lambiam. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:10, 13 March 2024 (UTC)