Annotation

This reformist periodical’s regular columns included ‘Foreign Writings (waishu), featuring theoretical articles about novels, serialised fiction (a category which included ‘Stories of Contemporary Events’, ‘Political Fiction’ and ‘Chivalric-Martial Fiction’), as well as translated fiction across many genres, among them detective, mysteries and adventure (the last including two pieces probably translated by the renowned translater Lin Shu). Its two major contributors were the brothers Huang Boyao and Huang Shizhong.

After the world ‘Illustrated” was added to the title, the magazine’s contents included more satirical comics and photographs of celebrities and travel spots. Also prominently featured were Cantonese oral literature, such as 'wooden fish songs', dragon boat songs, Cantonese ballads and Zhu Zhi Ci (or bamboo-twig poems). The authors or editors of these items appear to have had the goals of propagating reformist ideas. For instance, 'the wooden fish song' ‘Free-style Girl Idling in Places of Pleasure’ simultaneously criticised foot-binding, braid-queue keeping and superstitious customs while praising a person’s civic duties and rights to free love. The Southern tunes ‘The Hell of Opium Devils’ warned people about the harm done by opium and encouraged people to stop smoking it. It seems that by chance such works aimed at educating the masses through oral literature also helped preserve various features of Cantonese culture.