Canada said it regretted a "misunderstanding" after China lodged a formal complaint over a diplomat's order of a custom T-shirt displaying the word Wuhan, the city where the COVID-19 pandemic first emerged, over the emblem of hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan.
The logo of the American group is a stylized "W." Reports of the T-shirt order circulating on China's Twitter-like Weibo described it as depicting a bat, without mentioning Wu-Tang Clan. Many scientists suspect bats to have been a reservoir for COVID-19 before it jumped to humans.
It was not immediately clear how images of the T-shirt logo, which the Canadian Embassy said was created early last year, came to circulate on Chinese social media.