BELA was the first imitator that LEGO managed to sue successfully during 2017. Still, BELA deal a big slap to Danish brick maker by cloning a set 6 months before LEGO releasing it. BELA 11141 is based on upcoming LEGO 80103 Dragon Boat Race. It’s third Asia exclusive set this year and Dragon Boat festival will be celebrated in June 7th 2019. We could find picture of LEGO 80103 on the web with “confidential” watermark all over them. No official LEGO sale channel carried the set at this point of writing. Let’s do a comparison between LEGO and BELA’s box art.

LEGO 80103 Dragon Boat Race

BELA 11141 clone of LEGO 80103 Dragon Boat Race.

BELA swapped the position of the red and green dragon boat. Other than that, the packaging looks identical. At the same time, ebay sellers were found offering the LEGO sets while the official channel didn’t even had the stock!

We have no information on how BELA managed to clone the set. There were two possibility.

1. BELA got the set from insider from LEGO’s factory in China and make counterfeit copy out of it.

2. BELA reconstructed the set based on the leak picture.



The only way to find out would be comparing the instruction manuals of both, but we had to wait six months later as no original manual is available.

Review of BELA 11141 Dragon Boat Race

The review are based on photos courtesy of CK. You could order BELA 11141 from Aliexpress.

The box with the word “端午” indicated it’s for Dragon Boat festival.

Instruction manual and the back shown other Chinese festival sets that BELA cloned from the LEGO.

The parts came in bags without any numbering steps. The sticker quality is acceptable.

The set came with 15 minifigures. Five of them are spectators, who look like pedestrians of Ninjago City. The red flag and yellow flag represented the two competing teams. The guy with glasses is the judge and he has the flesh color hands.

The yellow team of dragon boat rowers. Some of the hair pieces were changed by BELA.

The rowers from the red dragon boat squad. Again, some of them had different hair style when comparing against the original.

Ending position marked by two buoys and flags.

A stall selling dumplings. Eating dumpling is a tradition during the Dragon Boat Festival.

A stove that’s used for boiling the dumpling, which are the green cheese slope parts.

Ceremonial stand with the golden cup for the dragon boat race.

There is a frog hiding under the stand.

The green and red dragon boats that are going to compete in the race.

Kudos to LEGO designer for clever use of parts to construct dragon head.

Dragon tails that could be tilt up or down.

Competition to start soon. Row, row, row your boat!

Beating the drums to lift the team spirit. The drum sticks are the wizard wands.

BELA Dragon Boat set versus LEGO Dragon Boat set.

Perhaps this is how BELA get even with LEGO after the lawsuit. Who knows BELA might turn around and sue LEGO for copying them. Hope this is just isolated case, otherwise if more imitators managed to clone sets even before the Danish brick maker had released it, it would seriously affect the sales of original sets. Do support the original whenever possible.

You could order BELA 11141 from Aliexpress.