12 Fun Facts You Might Not Know About Winnie The Pooh

In the 1925 Christmas Eve edition of The London News, English author A.A. Milne published “The Wrong Sort of Bees,” the first story that mentioned his lovable bear Winnie The Pooh by name. The following October, he released the first book of Pooh stories, aptly titled Winnie-The-Pooh. Since then, the character has taken over our bookshelves and our TV and movie screens—and has been censored in China. Here’s a collection of facts that even the most dedicated visitor to the Hundred Acre Wood might not know.

1. A.A. Milne was a soldier and a playwright before Pooh came to dominate his legacy.
2. Winnie the Pooh was based on a real bear.
3. Christopher Robin Milne inspired his father’s greatest works.
4. Illustrator E.H. Shepard ambushed Milne for the job of drawing Pooh.
5. The real Christopher Robin resented his father, and Pooh.
6. Milne and Shepard seemed to regret Pooh, too.
7. Winnie the Pooh’s Latin translation is the only Latin book to ever crack The New York Times bestseller list.
8. A producer who purchased the rights to Pooh added his signature red T-shirt.
9. Pooh has become one of Disney’s most popular properties.
10. Pooh isn’t just for kids—he’s for academics, too.
11. The 2011 movie Winnie the Pooh featured three A.A. Milne stories that had never been adapted before.
12. Winnie the Pooh is sometimes censored in China.

A.A. Milne was a soldier and a playwright before Pooh came to dominate his legacy.

In World War I, Milne served in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment before being conscripted to military intelligence as a propagandist. His experiences inspired Peace With Honour, which denounced the war. Milne was also an assistant editor at the magazine Punch, and between 1903 and 1925, Milne published 18 plays and three novels—all before publishing a word on Winnie the Pooh.

Winnie the Pooh was based on a real bear.

During World War I, a Canadian soldier named Harry Colebourn made a pet of a black bear cub he bought from a hunter. The bear, named Winnipeg—or “Winnie” for short—became his troop’s mascot and later a resident of the London Zoological Gardens. She was an adored attraction, especially to a little boy named Christopher Robin Milne, son of author A.A. Milne. In fact, the boy loved Winnie so much that he named his own teddy bear after her.

Christopher Robin Milne inspired his father’s greatest works.

In the 1920s, Milne began writing stories and poems that became the books When We Were Very Young (it introduced a bear named Edward and a swan named Pooh and was published in 1924), Winnie-The-Pooh (1926), Now We Are Six (1927), and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). It was these stories where Christopher Robin’s adored toy animals Pooh, Tigger, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, and Roo made their literary debuts. Most of the original toys can be seen on display at the New York Public Library (Roo, however, isn’t there—that toy went missing in an apple orchard in the 1930s). The author included Owl and Rabbit to loop in some of the fauna that frolicked outside the Milne’s family home.

Illustrator E.H. Shepard ambushed Milne for the job of drawing Pooh.

Shepard and Milne shared a mutual colleague in English humorist E.V. Lucas, who believed the former would be perfect for the tricky task of bringing Milne’s fantasy world to life in delicate drawings. But Milne was reluctant to hire a political cartoonist, so Shepard took the initiative. As recounted by Milne’s old neighbor, Laurence Irving, Shepard wandered Ashdown Forest, the inspiration for Milne's mythical woods, and created a portfolio of sketches. Then he turned up unannounced at Milne's home, where he handed over his portfolio to Milne and won his approval.

The real Christopher Robin resented his father, and Pooh.

Being forever the tender little boy in Hundred Acre Wood didn’t suit Christopher Robin Milne. Like his father before him, he became a writer, but wrote memoirs of his own life, like The Enchanted Places (1974), The Hollow on the Hill (1998), and Beyond the World of Pooh (1998). “In pessimistic moments,” he wrote in The Enchanted Places, “when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.”

Milne and Shepard seemed to regret Pooh, too.

Having published four children’s books based on Pooh, A.A. Milne was eager to move on—but found that his creation overshadowed any other work he put into the world. “I wrote four ‘Children’s books,’ containing altogether, I suppose, 70,000 words—the number of words in the average-length novel,” he would later say. “Having said good-bye to all that in 70,000 words, knowing that as far as I was concerned the mode was outmoded, I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from Punch; as I have always wanted to escape. In vain ... As a discerning critic pointed out: the hero of my latest play ... was ‘just Christopher Robin grown up.’ So that even when I stop writing about children I still insist on writing about people who were children once. What an obsession with me children are become!”

Apparently, Shepard felt similarly: The BBC reported that when he got older, he called Pooh “that silly old bear” and regretted having done the drawings.

Winnie the Pooh’s Latin translation is the only Latin book to ever crack The New York Times bestseller list.

Titled Winnie Ille Pu, the 1960 release translated by Dr. Alexander Lenard stayed on the coveted list for 20 weeks, and ultimately demanded 21 printings, selling 125,000 copies. This accomplishment spoke in part to the book itself, which the Times called “the greatest book a dead language has ever known.” But it’s also evidence of Pooh's popularity: The adventures of this honey-loving bear have been translated into more than 50 languages, including Afrikaans, Czech, Finnish, Yiddish, and Esperanto.

A producer who purchased the rights to Pooh added his signature red T-shirt.

For nearly 30 years before Walt Disney began animating the bear, the American producer Stephen Slesinger held Pooh’s merchandising rights for the U.S. and Canada. The red T-shirt that is now a Pooh signature was added in 1932 for an RCA Victor picture record and a board game. By the ’40s, plush dolls donning the red top were being produced. When Slesinger’s widow, Shirley Slesinger Lasswell, licensed Pooh merchandising to Disney in 1961, the animators decided to keep the look.

Pooh has become one of Disney’s most popular properties.

In 1961, Walt Disney also purchased the motion picture rights from the Pooh Property Trust (which held the rights after Milne and his wife passed away), and so began a brand that continues to thrive for his company. A series of Winnie the Pooh shorts were released in theaters starting in the late 1960s. In 1977, a trio of those shorts were combined to create Pooh’s first theatrical release, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. The 1980s brought two television shows: Welcome to Pooh Corner and The New Adventures of Winnie The Pooh. Then the 2000s offered The Tigger Movie, Piglet’s Big Movie, Pooh’s Heffalump Movie, and the CGI series My Friends Tigger & Pooh. There have also been a slew of straight-to-DVD releases. Disney purchased all of the Pooh rights from the Pooh Property Trust in 2001 for $350 million. It’s estimated that Pooh makes $3 to $6 billion for the House of Mouse annually.

Pooh isn’t just for kids—he’s for academics, too.

Scholars and philosophers have been pulling from Pooh for inspiration. American author Benjamin Hoff wrote both The Tao of Pooh (1982) and The Te of Piglet (1992) to explain principles of the Chinese philosophical school of Taoism. Scholar John Tyerman Williams responded with the long but self-explanatorily titled Pooh and the Philosophies: In Which It Is Shown That All of Western Philosophy Is Merely a Preamble to Winnie-The-Pooh (1996) and Pooh and the Psychologists (2001). And English professor and author Frederick Crews penned a satire of literary criticism, The Pooh Perplex (1963), as well as Postmodern Pooh (2001), which satirized academic trends in case studies.

The 2011 movie Winnie the Pooh featured three A.A. Milne stories that had never been adapted before.

Made in the style of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, this theatrical release utilized traditional hand drawn animation and was staged within the pages of a book. It contained seven original songs written by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the husband/wife writing team that would go on to pen Frozen’s Oscar-winning song “Let It Go.” The movie also featured a reprisal of the classic “Winnie The Pooh” theme sung by Zooey Deschanel.

Winnie the Pooh is sometimes censored in China.

It all started when a photo of Barack Obama and Chinese president Xi Jinping was juxtaposed with an image of Pooh and Tigger on social media. The following year Xi was mockingly compared to Pooh again, this time due to an image of him shaking hands with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. After that, images using Pooh to mock Xi began being censored. The comparisons also popped up after Xi appeared in a military parade in 2015, leading to more censorship. Movies featuring the character have also been banned. Rongbin Han, an associate professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia, told NPR in 2023, “Winnie the Pooh has become a symbol for dissidents in China. So now the character alludes to Xi Jinping himself and the president doesn't like this.”

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A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2025.