In 1970 Hong Kong had around eleven hundred toy factories employing about forty thousand people. Two years later it passed Japan and became the largest exporter of toys in the world. By 1980 there were more than two thousand factories and fifty-six thousand workers.
Star Wars figures were made there. Rubber ducks. Thomas the Tank Engine. Dinky cars for the American market. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, in 1989, by a Hong Kong company called Playmates.
The Label
It did not start well. Early on, "Made in Hong Kong" was a mark against a product rather than for it, and shipments marked that way were sometimes sent back.
That changed over about two decades. Costs rose, standards rose, and the factories moved upmarket because they had to. By the 1980s the label had turned into a guarantee of decent quality at a workable price, which is close to the opposite of what it began as. The same thing had happened to "Made in Japan" a generation earlier.
Then the factories left. Production moved across the border into mainland China through the 1980s and 1990s. Hong Kong companies still manage a large share of the world's toy manufacturing, but the floors are elsewhere now.
What the Children There Played With
The Hong Kong Museum of History put the odd part of this plainly when it staged an exhibition of two thousand toys from the city's history.
Hong Kong made toys for children all over the world. The children of Hong Kong played with toys from all over the world.
A generation grew up in a city where toys were everywhere, arriving in crates and leaving in crates, designed in America or Britain or Japan for children somewhere else. Michael Lau, born there in 1970, has described what that was like: the toys were everywhere and every one of them was a treasure.
Making Their Own
In 1998 Lau made a series of figures called Gardener. They were not licensed characters and they were not for children. They were street kids, skaters, people from the Hong Kong he knew, made as sculpture in editions and sold to collectors.
He is generally credited with starting what became known as urban vinyl, and with it the designer toy movement. Toy2R had been founded in the city three years earlier. Within a decade Hong Kong had a scene: artists, studios, conventions, a whole category of object that was recognisably a toy and recognisably not for playing with.
It is a strange and satisfying reversal. The city that spent thirty years making other people's characters for other people's children produced a generation who made their own, and exported those instead.
Where URDU Fits
URDU is a recent arrival in that line, an art studio founded in Hong Kong in 2021, making its own characters and also reworking famous ones under licence.
That combination is not a contradiction there. It is more or less the whole history of the place, compressed into a single studio: the licensed work and the original work, made by the same hands, in the city that has been doing both for half a century.