Roughly every month, Toyotarō provides a drawing of a Dragon Ball (or related…!) character — as well as an accompanying comment — on the official Japanese Dragon Ball website. Following up on the wealth of characters already drawn, for his November 2025 entry, Toyotarō has drawn Tao Pai-pai:

Tao Pai-pai

On this installment of the “old man character series,” it’s everyone’s favorite, Tao Pai-pai! He doesn’t actually look that old, but according to the guidebooks, by the time he appeared in the story, he was supposedly already 291 years old… Will we ever know the truth behind the Turtle siblings’ and the Crane brothers’ long lives?

An age of 291 for Tao Pai-pai (at the time of his first appearance in the series) is initially given in the franchise’s first guide book, the Dragon Ball: Adventure Special from 1987. Working the math backward knowing what we know about the calendar system from later in the series, this would place his birth year as circa Age 459. Years later, Tao Pai-pai’s character biography in Daizenshuu #7 goes with this same math, concretely placing his birth year as Age 459.

This drawing and comment set has been added to the respective page in our “Translations” archive.