02. January 2023
As gorgeous and innocent looking this “Honey Soap” advertising poster featuring Chinese actress Li Lili is, it actually tells the story of several dark episodes from China’s marketing and entertainment history.
12. December 2022
A sophisticated Old Shanghai lady relaxing with a bite of Fry’s chocolate at her country home. Her bamboo flute (or is it maybe an opium pipe?) close beside her. What in 1927 may have sounded like an intriguing value proposition for J.S. Fry & Son’s in the Middle Kingdom, turned out to be nothing but a pipe dream…. Joseph Fry from Bristol, England started making chocolate around 1759. After several changes of name and ownership, the business became J. S. Fry & Sons in 1822. In...
07. November 2022
In November 2022 the Chinese government issued new regulations for celebrity related advertising. Among others the updated rules prohibit celebrity endorsements of medicines, off-campus education and – finally - tobacco. What sounds fairly reasonable for today’s standards actually took the authorities over a century to crack down on: the practice of Chinese singers and movie stars unscrupulously peddling cigarettes goes back to the early 20th century and, as we will see, sometimes even with...
24. October 2022
In 1848 John B. Curtis from Maine developed the first commercial chewing gum, inspired by American Indians who chewed resin made from the sap of spruce trees. The product innovation soon became popular across the USA and beyond. Already in 1890, we find a first mention of chewing gum being available for Christmas season in the International Settlement of Shanghai from American trading firm Mustard & Co. But it took another 20 years before mass-marketing to a wider Chinese audience would...
10. October 2022
My Dear, or Měilì (美丽牌) meaning “beautiful” in Chinese, was the most popular Chinese cigarette brand out of Shanghai during Republican China. Since its inception it was famous for the attractive, confident and modern “new women” featured in its advertisements, ubiquitous across billboards, magazines and newspapers. Its Chinese slogan 有美皆备，无丽不臻 literally means “everyone wants the beauty because without beauty there is no completeness” but in more creative...
22. August 2022
Hatamen brand cigarette cards depicting early 20th century Chinese beauties. Such trading cards were inserted in cigarette packaging as collectibles to drive brand loyalty.
14. August 2022
A stunning illustration on this vintage box by the Chinese “Healthy” Pure Silk Hosiery brand (健美牌). The voyeuristic perspective and dramatic interaction of light and shadow is reminiscent of American realist painter Edward Hoppers art. Even more intriguingly though, the lady’s thin long eyebrows and her short hairstyle with romantic waves undoubtedly dates the image to the 1930s, while the low-key black and white setting in an inner-city apartment with Venetian blinds is much more...
07. August 2022
In the autumn of 1930, the national government of Shanxi province established the Jinhua Cigarette Factory (晋华卷烟厂) in the city of Taiyuan by merging several smaller private tobacco producers. The state-owned enterprise produced cigarettes throughout the 1930s until November 1937, when the Japanese army occupied Taiyuan and took over the operations. It remained active under the name “No 13 Factory” until the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War after which it was nationalized again...
11. May 2022
Advertisement calendar posters were the most important of the many forms of visual advertisement in China. They were introduced from the West and printed in glowing color lithography. These calendars posters, known in China as yuefenpai, were directed primarily at Chinese, not Western, customers. Most often, calendar images supplied by printers had little or no connection with the product or service being retailed. They were produced with an abundance of different pictures to appeal to a range...
Contact 聯繫我們
