Dumpling Emoji

A crescent-shaped dumpling of folded dough, pinched along the top seam, ready for steaming or frying. The design is deliberately generic, meant to represent not just Chinese jiaozi but also Japanese gyoza, Korean mandu, Polish pierogi, Nepali momo, Latin American empanadas, and every other filled-dough pocket humans have invented across thousands of years. That was a conscious choice by designer Yiying Lu and journalist Jennifer 8. Lee, who co-created the proposal and fought for two years to get it approved.

Most people use 🥟 to talk about food: dinner plans, cravings, or recipes. But it doubles as a term of endearment ("my little dumpling"), similar to the French mon petit chou ("my little cabbage"). In Chinese culture, the dumpling carries a deeper symbolic weight: jiaozi resemble ancient gold ingots, so eating them during Lunar New Year represents prosperity and wealth for the coming year. Families gather to fold hundreds by hand on New Year's Eve, sometimes hiding a coin inside one for extra luck.

🥟 sits in Unicode's "food-prepared" subcategory alongside other cooked dishes. It's one of the few food emojis with a real grassroots origin story, and the campaign behind it helped democratize the entire emoji creation process.

🥟 shows up most around food content: dumpling recipes on TikTok, dim sum photos on Instagram, ramen-shop reviews on X. It peaks during Lunar New Year (January/February) when millions of posts celebrate jiaozi traditions. Foodies and food bloggers use it as a signature emoji, and Asian food accounts treat it as a shorthand for their niche. It's also common in flirty or affectionate texts as a cute pet name ("you're such a dumpling 🥟"). Among the Asian diaspora, 🥟 carries cultural pride: it represents home cooking, family gatherings, and the comfort of familiar food far from home.

On August 8, 2015, designer Yiying Lu (the creator of Twitter's famous Fail Whale) was texting with journalist Jennifer 8. Lee about meeting up for dumplings in San Francisco. Lu reached for a dumpling emoji and realized it didn't exist. She sketched one on the spot: an anthropomorphic dumpling with heart-shaped eyes, rosy cheeks, and a big smile. Lee saw it and said, "We should let other people use it, too."

What followed was a two-year campaign that changed how emojis get made. They formed Emojination, launched a Kickstarter to raise money for associate membership in the Unicode Consortium, and hit their $3,750 goal in 50 hours. The final campaign raised $12,478 from 318 backers, with endorsements from chefs and food writers.

In January 2016, Lu and Lee presented their proposal at a Unicode Consortium meeting at an IBM office. The committee had feedback: food emoji can't have faces (Lu removed the anthropomorphic features), and food items should be shown at a 45-degree angle (she redrew it). The final design intentionally "doesn't look precisely like any dumpling" so it could represent jiaozi, pierogi, and empanadas equally.

The committee was so impressed they asked Lu to design three more emoji: the takeout box 🥡, chopsticks 🥢, and fortune cookie 🥠. Lee went on to become vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, and Emojination helped push through the hijab emoji and interracial couple emoji. The dumpling didn't just get an emoji. It helped open the process so that anyone, not just the 17 voting member corporations, could shape the emoji keyboard.

1. 2015Yiying Lu sketches the first dumpling emoji concept with an anthropomorphic face
2. 2015Emojination Kickstarter launches December 16, raising $12,478 from 318 backers
3. 2016Formal proposal (L2/16-024) presented to Unicode Consortium at IBM office in January
4. 2016Face removed and angle adjusted per Unicode design guidelines
5. 2017Approved in Unicode 10.0 / Emoji 5.0, officially released March 2017
6. 2017Facebook controversially renders it as a xiaolongbao (soup dumpling) instead of a generic dumpling
7. 2018Facebook updates design to be more culturally neutral after creator criticism

• •The Emojination Kickstarter raised $12,478 from 318 backers to get the dumpling emoji approved. The original goal was $3,750, reached in just 50 hours.
• •Archaeologists unearthed 2,500-year-old dumplings at a site in Shandong Province, China, making dumplings one of the oldest prepared foods still eaten today.
• •The Unicode Consortium was so impressed by Lu and Lee's proposal that they asked Lu to also design the takeout box 🥡, chopsticks 🥢, and fortune cookie 🥠.
• •In Chinese tradition, jiaozi resemble ancient gold ingots. Families eat them at midnight on New Year's Eve because the word jiǎozi sounds like a phrase meaning "bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new".
• •The Wikipedia article on the dumpling emoji has its own entry separate from the dumpling article, one of only a handful of emojis with dedicated Wikipedia pages.
• •Jennifer 8. Lee went from proposing the dumpling emoji to becoming vice-chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, helping approve hundreds of new emojis.
• •Facebook's original dumpling design was a soup dumpling (xiaolongbao), which creators called out for being too region-specific. It was later redesigned.
• •The city of Utsunomiya and Hamamatsu in Japan compete annually for the title of Japan's gyoza capital, based on per-capita consumption.