Gōngzǎi Bāo (公仔包) is a shaped steamed bun, the baozi cousin whose defining trait is form rather than filling, with a name that translates roughly to doll or character bun. The angle is that the bread itself is the point: the dough is pinched, folded, or pressed into a recognizable shape, an animal, a face, a figure, so the craft lives in the shaping and the steam, and whatever goes inside is built to support that rather than the other way around. Get it right and a smooth, white, cleanly featured bun arrives with a tidy filling tucked invisibly inside; get it wrong and it steams into a wrinkled, split lump where the shape is lost and the filling has either leaked or vanished.
The build is a steamed-bun discipline with an extra demand for control. An enriched, slightly sweet white dough is proofed, portioned, and worked into shape, often with separate small pieces of dough added for ears, eyes, or limbs, sometimes tinted, then filled if it is a filled style and pleated closed at the base so the seam hides underneath. It is steamed until set, puffed, and matte-smooth. Good execution shows in the surface and the structure: the skin is taut, pale, and unbroken with the features still crisp after steaming, the bun has lifted evenly without collapsing, and any filling is sealed cleanly so it does not blow out the side. Sloppy versions fail visibly. Over-proofed or rushed dough wrinkles and the carefully made features sag or fall off in the steamer; too wet a filling tears the seam and weeps out; a steam that is too fierce blisters and yellows the skin and the clean doll face is gone; underworked dough steams dense and the shape reads muddy rather than sharp.
It shifts mostly by what, if anything, goes inside and how elaborate the shaping runs. Plain versions are unfilled, eaten for the soft sweet dough alone, often as a child's snack or a festive piece. Filled forms carry the usual steamed-bun repertoire: sweet lotus or red bean paste, or a savory minced pork or custard center, chosen for being firm enough not to compromise the shape. Tinted dough and added detail push some versions toward pure novelty. The standard round filled baozi and the lotus-paste sweet buns are close relatives built on the same dough but judged on filling rather than form, so they belong in their own articles rather than folded in here.