Annotation

Quwei appeared every Sunday as a supplement to Nüyou (‘Girlfriend’ – ‘a magazine published every ten days on interesting matters concerning two sexes’). Although no copies of Nüyou, which appears to have been published both before and after the second world war, are held in any periodical collection, copies of two issues of Quwei have survived.

Its main focus was entertainment news, supplemented with a few ‘surprises’ and ‘extras’. Both of the two surviving issues covered polling for the first Miss Hong Kong contest. Both also had a sensational report on their frontpages, respectively ‘Yi-Nin Lee raped by Yu-Hsiang Yen and his son’, a piece based on a letter written to the magazine by Lee, and ‘The kidnapping of Sun Ma Sze Tsang’, a report of an abduction and rescue in the Guangdong town of Xiqiao.

Such articles were probably aimed at boosting sales, not at offering accurate or objective reportage – an approach typical among tabloids of the era. Quwei is also typical in representing a certain ‘Cantonese style’. Saam Kap Dai, a form of writing that combined classical Chinese, Cantonese and standard Chinese, and written Cantonese are both used widely, along with gossip about film stars and opera stars, fiction of various kinds, records of strange or funny events and works by Wang Xiangqin, a famous writer of romances.