BAIC Off-Road dressed the BJ40 as a Qing prince at the Forbidden City. It backfired.

On the evening of December 15, 2025, BAIC Off-Road's official Weibo account posted a launch poster for the BJ40 extended-range SUV: 'When Lord BJ4 meets the Forbidden City's first snow.' The image showed a model in Qing-dynasty court robes and a long queue standing beside the vehicle in front of the palace's red walls and yellow tiles, with the line 'This is our home turf — Lord BJ4 arrives' — a pun on the model number BJ40 and 'Si Ye', the title of an imperial prince.

The backlash was immediate. Critics read a car posing inside the Forbidden City as an echo of the 2020 'Mercedes G in the Forbidden City' scandal — a symbol of privilege at the country's most sensitive heritage site — and the imperial-court styling as nostalgia for rank and hierarchy. Buyers asked online whether purchasing the SUV came with a queue. Customer service told reporters it knew nothing about the campaign and could not reach the team responsible.

At 15:05 on December 16 the post was quietly deleted. No apology followed. The stumble landed at the brand's commercial peak: November 2025 sales had just set a record of 22,427 vehicles, the eighth straight month above 10,000, with cumulative sales of 135,000 — proof that the product was working while the brand's storytelling had fallen behind it.

The brand deleted the post without apology, but the backlash hit at record sales of 22,427 vehicles in November 2025, showing product worked while storytelling lagged.

The creative leaned on imperial privilege — the one value the Forbidden City's public history makes taboo — to sell a mass-market SUV.

A vehicle staged inside the palace inevitably recalled the 2020 'G-Wagon in the Forbidden City' scandal, guaranteeing the privilege reading.

The brand had no response plan: customer service could not locate the campaign's owners, and the only remedy was silent deletion.

A heritage site is not a set. Cultural symbols carry their own history into the frame, and staging that needs explaining costs more attention than it buys — especially at the moment sales are highest.

BAIC Off-Road deleted the poster and offered no public apology. The brand's sales momentum — 22,427 vehicles in November 2025, a record — continued on product strength, while the campaign became a cited example of car marketing's gap between technical awards and cultural judgment.