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On Lego, love and friendship

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Children build Lego toys in a gift shop of Legoland Shanghai Resort on its opening day on July 5.

Children playing with Lego toys in a shop in Legoland Shanghai Resort on July 5.

PHOTO: REUTERS

The Economist

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There is a locked room in Lego’s corporate museum, in Billund, Denmark, which is called the Vault. It is a large space, filled with shelves that are arranged in chronological order, starting in 1958 and stretching towards the present day. Between them, the shelves contain around 10,000 sets of Lego.

The Vault is used by the toymaker’s designers as a source of inspiration, but its effect on first-time visitors is what makes the room remarkable. It’s impossible not to seek out sets from your own childhood, not to be drawn back to an earlier version of yourself and, for lots of people, not to well up. We thought about having Kleenex as a sponsor, says Ms Signe Wiese, an in-house historian.

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