A striking architectural design for a major new train station here has set Chinese social media aflame, though likely not for the reason its creators intended. Rather than admiring the project’s purported inspiration from Nanjing’s iconic plum blossoms, online commentators have roundly mocked what they see as the station’s unmistakable resemblance to a feminine hygiene product.

“This is a giant sanitary pad,” read one popular comment on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging platform. “It’s embarrassing to say it looks like a plum blossom.”

The wry observations highlighting the North Nanjing Station’s pad-like appearance have proven a viral hit across Chinese internet forums. Threads devoted to jeering the design have racked up millions of views on multiple platforms, turning the edifice into a nationally recognized punch line before a single steel beam has been laid.

“Why can we all tell it is a sanitary pad immediately, but the architects can’t?” asked one baffled Weibo user amid a deluge of period puns and jokes about poor planning. “I think we should take this chance to call for society to pay attention to period shaming. This design is ahead of its time,” quipped another.

Railway officials and the station’s designers have remained mum amid the online furor. According to the state-run Nanjing Daily, the preliminary blueprints were officially greenlighted by both provincial authorities and the China State Railway Group, paving the way for an early 2024 groundbreaking.

When complete at an estimated cost of 20 billion yuan (over $2.7 billion), the eye-catching station will span a total area of nearly 15 square miles in northern Nanjing. Its curvaceous roof was intended to evoke the delicate folds of the plum blossom, a flower indelibly linked to the ancient capital’s heritage and identity.

For the Internet comedians of the Middle Kingdom, however, the design’s fanciful aspirations have been overshadowed by a more mundane connection — one they seem determined to never let the architects forget.

“Maybe it’s a plum blossom, maybe it’s not,” read one tongue-in-cheek summary. “But we all know what we really see.”