Annotation

Tianqu Huabao was a monthly pictorial featuring gossip from ‘places of pleasure’. Its contents included portraits of  jiaoshu, waitresses, sing-song girls, drama actresses, female opera stars, film actresses from Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong. Its ‘Nantang Xiandaiji” (‘A Modern Account of Nantang’) and ‘Zhujiang Fngyue’ (‘Breeze and Moon over the Pearl River’) columns were devoted to the customs of prostitution. Other articles covered ‘weird’ news, film reviews, story-telling scripts, satire, fiction and a pseudo-Michelin guide that commented on the cost, dishes and services of restaurants. The magazine was written using classical Chinese, vernacular Chinese and Cantonese.