Chapter 5. Tianlang's Dream of Industrialised Cosplay

A chapter from THE HISTORY BEHIND CHINESE GAMES, the author's unfinished second book, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 五 天狼的COSPLAY工业化梦想

First published in the author's Zhihu column on October 25, 2014: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19863755

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 3, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Jiang Hui (蒋慧) was born in Hongkou, Shanghai, on March 26, 1986. He is a textbook Aries: driven, competitive, blazing like the sun. Most people are probably more familiar with his other name, Tianlang (天狼), a name everyone in Chinese cosplay circles knows.

Behind the scenes, the company Tianlang runs, Langsheng Culture and Art Planning (朗盛文化艺术策划有限公司), is very well known. They are the cosplay prop makers and event contractors of choice for Tencent, NetEase and a number of other large companies. You can see their hand in every League of Legends anniversary celebration and in events like it.

What is cosplay?

Cosplay is the shortened form of the English "costume play". It generally means using clothing, accessories, props and make-up to play a character from an anime, a manga or a game. It began in the United States and flourished in Japan.

The definition of cosplay has now grown very broad, and the subjects people dress up as have expanded from fictional figures to real people, and even to whole types of people. Those who love cosplay usually call themselves cosplayers.

Tianlang came into the field as a cosplayer himself, and later took on hosting work as well. He has been the host of the Chinajoy Cosplay national carnival since 2005 and still is, and he lived through the entire promotional run of games such as World of Warcraft in The9's day and League of Legends.

Tianlang's company is now in Hangzhou, where he rents two villas, one to store cosplay materials and equipment, the other for offices and for people to live in.

He put it in Hangzhou, he says, not only because the cost of living there is lower than in Shanghai, but also because the city is rich in artistic resources.

Cosplay calls for a great deal of art and design work, and prop making places high demands on sculpture and other crafts and on equipment. The China Academy of Art, which is in Hangzhou, can meet all of that.

Hangzhou produces silk and every kind of fabric, which cosplay costumes need, and for the garment-making skills the work requires, professionals can be found in the fashion department at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University. Then there is the demand for decorative pieces large and small, supported by Zhejiang's thriving small workshops.

Add the make-up and performance training at the Communication University of Zhejiang, and all of this gives the industrialisation of cosplay uniquely favourable conditions in which to grow.

In recent years, Tianlang and his team have been in a much better position. Tencent Games, with whom they have worked for years, gives them plenty of time and creative room to complete an order, and a great deal of financial support as well.

Ten years and more ago, though, Tianlang did not have it nearly so easy.

His parents' divorce left him furious and turned him very rebellious. He moved out in his second year of senior secondary school and started earning his own money while he was still very young. Looking for work, he wore an employment agency down with sheer persistence, but he was too young for them to place him anywhere, so in the end they simply kept him there doing data entry. He typed for hours every day and all ten of his fingers were black.

Tianlang was already following cosplay closely at that stage, but between work and school he had no way to take part. He says his reasons for loving cosplay are fairly complicated: a sense of belonging, a sense of achievement, the search for like-minded company, and an escape from reality.

When SARS broke out in 2003 it was dangerous to be outside, and his teacher persuaded him to go home. His drifting life over, he could finally be the cosplayer he wanted to be. He joined a group, and on his very first outing he was lucky enough to cosplay the male lead of Get Backers (闪灵二人组).

But cosplay is an expensive hobby. In the early days there were very few dedicated makers of props and costumes, so everything had to be bought and made by hand, which was slow, hard work and expensive as well. So he went back to part-time jobs, and he also tried his hand at hosting cosplay events, because a host's fee was rather higher.

A lucky coincidence

In 2004, Tianlang heard that Chinajoy was going to run a cosplay promotion on Shanghai campuses, and he volunteered to take it on. He did so well at the event that Ao Mei Electronic (奥美电子) invited him to host their stand at CJ that year, which in turn introduced him to the person in charge at Hanwei Exhibition (汉威展览), the company organising Chinajoy. From then on he began working on the Chinajoy Cosplay national carnival.

The right time, the right place, the right people

In 2004, Shanda's stock market listing marked the beginning of explosive growth among Chinese games companies. After that came The9's World of Warcraft, Giant's Zhengtu Online (征途), Tiancity's Mabinogi and Shanda's Aion, and demand for promoting anime and games products of every kind came flooding in.

Tianlang caught that era at exactly the right moment. Jingzhirenxing (镜之人型), the cosplay group he belonged to, became one of these companies' long-term suppliers. At the best of times almost every cosplay order for the whole of Chinajoy's Hall One was being handled by them. The group once produced a famous set of Saint Seiya Gold Saints cosplay called the Twelve Houses (黄金十二宫), which was extremely well known.

Over those years Tianlang also moved from hosting cosplay events to planning and running them, building up a great deal of experience and a wide network of contacts, and that laid the foundation for the company he would later start himself.

In 2008, the upheaval over the change of the Chinese licence for World of Warcraft had a large effect on the whole industry.

A new emperor brings his own court. The new licence holder would not accept the existing system of suppliers, and less and less work was allocated to Tianlang. He even thought about leaving the trade for something else.

Just then, the four trillion yuan of state investment prompted by the world financial crisis of 2008 pulled Tianlang back into cosplay.

Part of that four trillion, it turned out, went to supporting the car industry, and the motor show market across the country suddenly caught fire. It also coincided with the release of the live-action Transformers film, and the well-known American car brand Chevrolet wanted a Bumblebee Autobot, and wanted it on a national tour at that. This piece of business, which walked in through the door of its own accord, put food on Tianlang's table again.

The work was there, but Tianlang was miserable.

Because the job was so dull. You took a finished Bumblebee and toured the country with it. The same procedure and the same content every time, and you were not allowed to add or remove anything as you pleased.

Tianlang says that taking on the then obscure League of Legends in 2010 was a fluke, the result of exactly that state of utter boredom.

In March 2010, Bobi (波比) of Tencent Games rang Tianlang. That call changed a great deal of what came afterwards.

Bobi said they were launching a new game and needed 18 to 20 cosplay characters made.

That gave Tianlang a shock. Until then, when a games company set out its cosplay requirements it did so by class, warrior, rogue, hunter, healer and so on, which came to four or five characters. Even World of Warcraft only had four to eight characters made for each new version. Tianlang had genuinely never seen a company do what Tencent was doing.

Tianlang says that if this request had come to him before 2008 he might well have turned it down, because it sounded so far-fetched. But the motor shows were so unbelievably boring that he took it.

From that point, Tianlang's life entered an entirely new stage.

In 2009, before he set up his own company, Tianlang had spent some time taking stock of his industry and thinking it through.

Two roads lay in front of him. One was to be a cosplayer, build a name and then find a way to turn that attention into money. The other was to be the supplier, providing services to the anime and games companies who were the clients.

Tianlang says that in cosplay circles those who do make a name can earn something like 300,000 to 500,000 yuan a year from events and from selling photographs and other merchandise, but it is not very stable. He felt the moment was not yet right for the first road, that he had to survive first and talk about growth afterwards. And so he settled firmly on running a company and taking the second road.

Demanding clients, unwavering commitment

In 2010, to keep the team alive, Tianlang took orders from plenty of other companies besides Tencent: making cosplay props for Fan Bingbing (范冰冰) for King of Kings 3 (万王之王3), for instance, and handling Changyou's Chinajoy orders.

Then in September 2011 Tianlang suddenly realised that League of Legends had actually taken off. Orders and event requests from Tencent Games began to multiply, and even with the whole company's energy on it he still could not keep up.

Promoting League of Legends

At first Tianlang tried to tell the game's backstory through stage plays that set the opposing factions against each other, because this was a method that had been used regularly since the World of Warcraft days. Everyone surely remembers the line "For the Horde!" It was a very successful piece of planning.

And so, on September 22, 2012, at the first anniversary of League of Legends, there was the stage play in which someone shouted "Demacia!" with every step the cosplayer playing the Prince, Jarvan IV, took. And after that "Demacia!" became a nationwide phenomenon.

But times had changed, and what players wanted had changed with them.

Tianlang found that in the early stage of promoting a game a lot of new players did not seem to care about the backstory. In many new games the backstory was itself a free-for-all, with mythological and historical figures of every kind thrown in together. Audiences did not respond to a stage play built on opposing factions nearly as strongly as they did to a display of chest and leg, or to a hero parade.

What is a hero parade?

It is when you have a huge number of cosplay characters and each comes on stage in turn, strikes a pose and delivers their famous line from the game, something like "Your sword is my sword!" and the crowd below erupts.

This left Tianlang very frustrated.

Because by this point Tianlang had ample experience, manpower and resources to raise the standard of directing, script writing and stage design, and of prop making above all. He had even adopted industrial grade finishing standards, and could shut himself away for three months, eighteen hours a day, working on nothing but props.

The "Future Warrior" (未来战士) cosplay at the second anniversary of League of Legends, for instance, which won recognition from every quarter, was made that way. Even peers abroad sent their congratulations.

But Tianlang was not satisfied with a stage format that amounted to a hero parade and a catwalk. He says they were stuck at that ceiling for a while.

Fortunately, as promotion of the game went deeper, the competitive side of League of Legends began to be accepted by the wider public. With the champions' stories and the struggles of the esports players to draw on, Tianlang's team began trying once again to work esports elements in. At the third anniversary, for example, there was the theme of the determination to take on Korea's best, and the audience would use cosplay to relive the pleasure they had had in the game.

Tianlang says he hopes that one day cosplay can give players far more to feel in common, that everyone will sit down together and share the stories of the champions, the stories players have with one another, the stories of playing in a party with friends, the stories of the games that went wrong, because this is our game and our life.

Where does cosplay go from here?

Tianlang has thought about it a great deal. In the United States there is Marvel Comics, which after years of building has mature IP, intellectual property, and is now taking that IP to enormous success in live-action films of comic book characters.

So, given that cosplay too was born out of these fictional vessels, might it one day go back the other way and become the cradle of live-action film, or a part of it?

That is of course a very long road.

For now, what gives Tianlang more of a headache is the lack of understanding and the disorderly competition inside his own industry.

He says it is a little like esports circles a few years ago. First there is the family who do not understand and do not support it, who think cosplay is not a proper job. Then there is the fact that the industry has no rules yet. You train up a promising young cosplayer or a team, and another team comes along with money and takes them straight away, ignoring any penalty clause, poaching people by force, and you have no way at all of holding them to anything. If that situation cannot be broken, nobody can develop with any peace of mind, let alone grow.

He thinks that perhaps the industry is still too small and the time is not yet right.

So Tianlang has put more of his energy into improving every part of cosplay: training more prop makers, raising the industrial standard of the products, and improving the staging of plays, from industrial design, voice work, mould making and lighting and stage design to musicals.

Tianlang says what we do is not just industry, it is a form of artistic creation. The point of a breakthrough in industrial terms is not to show how impressive the technology is, but to use those means to tell the story better and to pass a feeling on to the players.

This is a great age, one in which we get to witness a great many things go from nothing to something. It is also a painful age, in which we have to live through a very long stretch of breaking new ground and of chaos.

Tianlang's dream of industrialised cosplay.