Xiaohongshu's Red Land Turned a Shanghai Industrial Island Into an Open-World Game

Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, has made its offline anime and gaming festival much bigger in its second year. Red Land 2026 ran from Oct. 2 to 6 on Fuxing Island, a former industrial island in Shanghai's Yangpu district, and drew more than 200,000 fans of animation, comics, games and novels, China Daily reports.

The site grew from 80,000 to about 150,000 square meters, and the number of IPs on the island more than doubled to over 160. They ranged from Chinese titles such as Honor of Kings, Black Myth: Wukong, Genshin Impact and Delta Force to Disney's Zootopia and Marvel. According to the organizer, all five rounds of ticket sales sold out, in 20.6 seconds each on average, Time Weekly reported.

The event is set up as an open-world game. Visitors take on a character when they arrive and play through storylines at more than 80 booths set among the island's slipways, warehouses and shipping containers. Each evening a parade of game and anime floats went down the island's main road. About 150 of those floats were made by Xiaohongshu users themselves.

"Red Land is not a fully organized comic convention, but rather an offline community festival created collaboratively by fans," founder Chen Wenbi, who leads marketing for Xiaohongshu's community department, told China Daily. The platform says more than 120 million of its monthly active users are interested in gaming, and the audience for anime content has reached 137 million.