Annotation

This monthly was collectively run by an editorial board from Guangzhou and Hong Kong that included Liang Qingping, then also the editor of Xianxiang Bao, in Hong Kong, and Zhang Qingquan, the editor of Xiao Luotian, in Guangzhou. Its cover and some advertisements were printed in colour. Its content was similar to that of many other pictorials of the time. Its first issue, for example, featured entertainment news about brothels, singers, opera actors and film stars alongside literary works and pictures of art works. Its text was written in both Classical and vernacular Chinese. From its second issue onwards, it claimed to be sponsored by a ‘renowned painter’, probably Gao Jianfu, and so was more ‘artistic’. Reports and photographs of prostitutes and sing-song girls were removed, with works of art from the Lingnan School, photography, seal carving, calligraphy and Western painting replacing them. Interestingly, a reproduction of Issue 4 included in the Hong Kong and Guangzhou volume of Minguo Hubao Hui Bian Gangjuan, (‘An Anthology of Pictorials from the Republican Era’), omits a six-page page report title ‘Despair in the aftermath of Communist Riots in Guangdong’.