China's "Calendar Girls"

[Randy W]

from the Sixth Tone

How China’s ‘Beauty Calendars’ Defined an Era’s Aesthetics
The highly sought-after calendars taught a generation of Chinese new ideas about beauty.

A GIF shows some of the women in a 1991 calendar published by Wenhui Press. From Kongfz.com

A page from a calendar, photographed by Jia Yuping. Courtesy of Jia Yuping

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The roots of beauty calendars can be traced back to the “monthly cards” of the Republican era — posters that commonly featured drawings of women in qipao dresses. In the 1950s, these evolved into calendars that showed a full year’s dates on one poster, which Shanghai export companies would send abroad as publicity for their businesses. Every year before Christmas, they would create new versions. Beautifully printed but not for sale, many Chinese families would nevertheless try to get their hands on them.

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Publishing a 13-page calendar with slightly sexy pictures of movie stars thus presented a risk. During preparations, when the photos were projected on a huge screen, everyone was struck by the pictures’ beauty and youthfulness. But there was also a kind of vague anxiety. After a few hours of viewing, the discussion still revolved around such trivial issues as “should the hair cover the ears?”

Proofs in hand, Xi went to see Liu Gao, the then-deputy director of the Communist Party’s powerful National Press and Publication Administration. Xi remembers that Liu picked up the proofs of the negatives one by one, examining each one carefully in the sunlight without saying a word. Xi stood nervously to the side, not daring to say a word. Liu finally turned around and said to Xi, “These pictures of actors are decent, and I see nothing that can’t be published!”

As soon as the calendar, titled “People in Movies,” was placed on the roster that year, the orders kept coming in. “223,000 copies? Is that right?” Xi said in surprise. Previously, an ordinary calendar with a pre-order quantity of 20,000 to 30,000 was already a very good showing. “People in Movies” was a huge success. From the next year on, art publishers in other regions launched their own movie star calendars, kicking off a trend that would last for more than a decade.

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Throughout the ’90s, “calendar wars” would be fought. Every year, most of the calendars in the state-run Xinhua bookstores were sold out by mid-December, and publishing houses’ stockpiles were soon gone as well. The presses would always print an extra 100,000 copies, the prices always rose, and nobody worried about unsold copies. For high-grade calendars with imported paper in 1995, the highest price was 288 yuan — about three-fifths of the national average monthly salary.