As President Xi Jinping stepped on to the tarmac at Hobart airport on Tuesday morning, an inconspicuous purple bear was thrust into his hands.
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Bobbie the bear may not mean a lot to Australians but the image of him in the President's hands would have been instantly recognisable in his homeland of China, where the lavender-stuffed heat bag is fawned after by women and suitors desperate to please them.
Bobbie became an overnight sensation when Chinese actresses Sun Li and Fan Bingbing posted online pictures of themselves hugging the bears, which are made by hand on a small farm in Nabowla, north of Launceston.
"Our phone system has gone into meltdown," farm managing director Robert Ravens said in January.
"We can't put Bobbie on the internet because the demand just overwhelms our ability to supply on a daily basis.
"It's caused our staff to be stressed, it's caused me to be stressed and it means we can't even take a holiday - they chase me all round the planet."
Despite the bear's runaway success, Mr Raven's team of 30 at Bridestowe Lavender Estate have deliberately capped the amount of bears they produce to what they can comfortably sell from their farm and from a few selected retailers.
"It seems every Chinese lady under 30 wants one, so every young man who wants to impress one has to procure one.
"Even if we wanted to meet that demand quickly, we couldn't."
Tasmanian lavender bears have become so popular in China the nation has had to battle a wave of counterfeit bears the authorities say pose a biosecurity threat.
In July, a Chinese news wire service revealed eight shipments of counterfeit lavender bears had been seized and destroyed since April by the Tianjin Inspection and Quarantine Bureau.
The bureau cited health concerns after finding moth and weevil contaminated wheat in a lavender bear shipped from Australia.
"We found lots of serious epidemic problems," Yin Liping from the Shanghai Inspection and Quarantine Bureau said.
"It shocked us that those seeds haven't been processed at all. We ran the germination examination and 100 per cent of them are alive. It brought risks to us."
Mr Ravens confirmed President Xi's new bear was an authentic Bobbie, so he should avoid the grisly fate of his scented comrades from unknown origins.
"The fake bear industry exploded a year ago, and it was horrible. Terrible bears full of nasty things were coming out of Australia and China pretending to be our bear, but that's starting to settle down now," Mr Ravens said.
