The Qinglou beauty pageant is a pot of alcoholic wine brewed by literati and scholars, with a fragrant aftertaste and endless aftertaste.
The Qinglou beauty pageant has a very elegant name: "Flower List" or "Flower Case". The flower list is to evaluate the quality of prostitutes; the flower case refers to the list of prostitutes who are judged, which may be related to the ancients' preference for using flowers as a metaphor for women. Since they are flowers, they must be beautiful, so whether they are green, fat, red or thin, they must be both talented and beautiful, and it is a contest between peonies and moons, not a contest between wildflowers and barnyard grass.
China's Qinglou beauty pageant has a long history, it is said that as early as the Song Dynasty, there were non-governmental organizations of prostitute beauty contests, called "flower evaluation list". The so-called flower list is a beauty pageant in the flower world, a contest of singers and prostitutes, usually judged by local literati and rich businessmen. Literati and celebrities value their eye for judging flowers and colors; while rich merchants are more because they are sponsors. After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the custom of pin yan prevailed, and Jinling and Suzhou and Hangzhou were among the leaders. During the Ming Jiajing period, the Jintan people and Jiajing Jinshi Cao Dazhang founded the "Lotus Terrace Xianhui" and the celebrities of the time, such as Wu Bogao and Liang Bolong, who were famous prostitutes, which was called a grand situation for a while. At that time, some people even selected the "Twelve Nobles of Jinling", but they were not the lin daiyu and Xue Baochao in "Dream of the Red Chamber", but the twelve famous prostitutes of the Jinling Qinglou with the surnames of Liu, Dong, Luo, Ge, Duan, Zhao, He, Jiang, Wang, Yang, Ma, and Chu.
After that, in the Wanli period, the Ice Pen Meishi used the Yandu prostitutes forty people with leaves to substitute for the fundraiser, and Cao Dazhang rewrote the "Female Table of Qin Huaishi", judging the talents of the prostitutes, and dividing them into ranks, including female Champions, Bangyan, Tanhua, Xieyuan, female bachelors, and Taishi. After the Qing army entered the customs, due to the need to rectify the world's style, the flower list was once silent. During the Shunzhi period, there was a wandering literati named Shen Xiuwen in Suzhou, who wandered in the Qinglou Chuguan all day long, and had a lot of experience with the women of the Qinglou, so he chose the Tiger Hill Plum Blossom Building as the flower field, set the quality high, elected Zhu Yun as the champion, Qian Rui as the list eye, Yu Hua explored the flowers, and there were twenty-eight winners, which was unprecedented for a while. Unfortunately, the social atmosphere in the early Qing Dynasty was not as open as in the late Ming Dynasty, and in the end, Shen Xiuwen was "killed under the staff" by the local magistrate Li Senxian on the charge of obstructing the weather. In this way, the beauty pageant of the Qinglou has become a sign that the literati and scholars do not do their work and hinder the weathering, and the flower list gradually disappears from people's lives.
However, with the popularity of hedonistic ideas and the opening of people's ideological concepts, during the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, the Qinglou beauty pageant resurged and became more and more intense. In the same and light years, the former rabbit idiot Daoist picked the red snow inscription "Twenty-four Female Flowers" at sea, and the thrush landlord Fu and his colleagues for "Continuing Flowers" took Li Peilan as the crown of the group. After the "Continuing Flowers", there was also the "Shanghai Book Immortal Flower List" determined by Gongzi Fang, listing twenty-eight prostitutes, and one flower than one prostitute, such as Wang Yiqing, who was known as a peony medicine, was good at style, which could be described as a hundred flowers blooming, and zi yan red.
The real brands that make the Qinglou beauty pageant are Li Baojia and Xi Yanzi. From 1897 to 1899, Li Baojia, the chief writer of Shanghai Game Newspaper, imitated the imperial court examination system and opened three subjects: one was the flower list, which won by color, similar to the modern Miss World and The Miss China Beauty Contest, and a total of three people, Zhang Sibao, Jin Xiaobao, and Zhu Ruchun, were selected, namely Yuanyuan, Bangyan, and Tanhua. The second class Cai Xinbao and thirty other people, the rest are the top three. The second is the martial arts list, which is good at singing, similar to the modern National Young Singers Grand Prix, and selects eighteen people such as Wang Xiulan, Jin Xiaoqing, Xiao Ruyi, Wang Xiulin and eighteen others. The third is the leaf list, taking the Yahuan waiter as the object, taking the meaning of the red flower and the green leaf lining, and also evaluating the three sisters of the first three sisters, the thirty-six people such as the second division Xue Baochao, and the rest are all three. Now it seems that Li Baojia's awareness of this initiative is ahead of its time, and the beauty contest and singing contest in the modern sense are probably traced back to him.
If Li Baojia wins with advanced consciousness, then Xi Yanzi wins with grand scale. In 1917, in order to expand its influence, the Shanghai New World Game Field held the Huaguo Election with ingenuity, and they hired Xi Yanzi, editor-in-chief of New World Newspaper, as the director to establish the Qunfang Election Conference. The specific operation method is: one ballot per person, one ballot is sold for one yuan, and the ballot is filled in with the address and advantages of the prostitute. On December 23 of that year, the vote was opened in the New World, and on New Year's Day in 1918, the candidates were announced, and finally the president of the National University of Flowers, Guan Fang, vice presidents Ju Di and Pei Jin, and Lian Ying, the prime minister of hua affairs, were elected. Therefore, it was the Republic of China period, so the Qinglou beauty pageant also followed the fashion, from the original title list to the president and prime minister. The beauty pageant alarmed Shanghai, and ordinary people joined in, becoming the largest qinglou beauty pageant in old China.
The Beauty Pageant in qinglou is a kind of leisure and elegance of the literati, but it is a good thing that the literati mock the moon. But for the Qinglou women who participated in the selection, it was a great time for them to change their destiny. Because once it becomes popular, it is like a female star, not only rising in value, the source of wealth is rolling in, but also found a shortcut to step into high society, and even has the opportunity to marry into the rich and be a wife. In this way, the prostitutes who participated in the competition racked their brains and tried their best to win a list, and if they could become a flower queen, it would be the best. And the best opportunity is to ask your own good friends to help. In this way, the bright and upright Qinglou beauty pageant hides a lot of cat grease and a lot of darkness.
The judges of the Qinglou beauty pageant are very important, the fate of the prostitutes participating in the competition is controlled by them, and the judges are invited by the organizers, so the final result of the election is determined by the organizers. However, organizers sometimes have to take care of the interests of sponsors, because only if they are willing to pay for it, the beauty pageant will have a reliable financial guarantee. Therefore, every beauty pageant is actually a contest between the organizer and the sponsor, and the final result reflects their victory or defeat.
Yu Huai's "Banqiao Miscellaneous" once recorded a prestigious beauty contest. The timing and location of the competition were chosen just right. The time is chosen on the day when the legendary Heavenly Cowherd and the Weaver Girl meet on the seventh day of the first month of July, which coincides with Chinese Valentine's Day; and the location is even better, picking the most famous Qinglou "Eight Hundred Jushui Pavilion" in Jinling; coupled with the local stage team also came to perform in friendship, it naturally attracted the people from all over the world to help the old and the young to watch, so that that that night, the road to the "Eight Hundred JuShui Pavilion" was noisy, and even the boats on the Qinhuai River were crowded. After a series of preliminary selections, twenty beauties were selected in the finals. In the end, the famous prostitute Wang Yue came out on top and became the flower leader of this beauty contest. However, the clear-eyed people immediately found that it was catty: Wang Yue was the good friend of the organizer Sun Wugong. It seems that the ranking of the competition is only afraid that it has been prepared before the game, and other beauties have only made Wang Yue's foil, which is the same as some of the current beauty pageants.
The original Qinglou beauty pageant was very subjective, and most of them were drawn up by a certain literati to draw up a beauty pageant list, which was for the "flower case". This will affect the fairness of the evaluation, because any judge, no matter how selfless he is, is still a family word, not universal. Therefore, the later Qinglou election was generally carried out openly, but openness does not mean fairness, because once the judges decide the results, it is inevitable that the judges will be bribed, and the reason why Wang Yue was elected is a living example of the judges being bribed by the organizers. Later, new election methods were invented, which were selected by the masses, so as to reflect the voice of the masses. However, the problem is again, the ballot needs money to buy, which is not affordable for ordinary people, so the fairness should be discounted. For example, in the 1917 election, each vote required an ocean, which was the salary of ordinary people for half a month. In this way, most of the people who participated in the voting were tycoons and gentry, so the final result could only be a reflection of their aesthetic standards.
The Beauty Pageant of the Qinglou originally originated from the elegance of the literati and inkers, and a bo beauty smiled. Since then, the Qinglou beauty pageant has gradually become a fashion, recognized by the general public, and relished. This, of course, has to do with the rise of prostitution in modern times, when money erodes into every corner of society, old moral concepts disintegrate, new moral concepts are not established, and the pluralistic vacuum of values and morals leaves many people confused and empty. The emergence of the Qinglou beauty pageant is meeting their psychological and emotional needs. Coupled with the help of media such as tabloids and tabloids, prostitutes have almost become a cultural form in people's lives, no different from drinking and playing cards. The Qinglou beauty pageant, which is based on this foundation, has thus become a great pleasure in people's social life, so that whenever the Qinglou beauty pageant is held, thousands of fans are eager to try, newspapers and periodicals publish jade photos of prostitutes, traffic in front of brothels, and lobbying by troublemakers, the grandeur is unprecedented.
For the intellectuals, not only did they gain a lot of fun and fill the inner emptiness, but more importantly, they expressed their inner resentment through this means and completed the attack on those in power in laughter and anger. For example, at that time, Shanghai's Zhonghua Xinbao commented: "When holding flower industry elections, the psychology in society can be divided into four categories. First, it is said that the president of the Republic of China did not worry about the will of the people, because he wanted to push it forward, in order to carry out election. Today, the borrowing of the flower country to hold a wine cup block, ulterior motives. Second, it is said that this election belongs to the officials of the Executive Ministry, and the Republic of China cannot do without the Legislative Department of the National Assembly, and it is planned to elect members of the National Assembly in the Great World, that is, the opposition party named after the pheasant who is qualified to be elected, in accordance with the name. Third, the name cannot be faked, and the name of the president is blatantly used in the name of the president by hooking people, and Yike is guilty of great disrespect, otherwise it will be harmful to the wind and the wind. Fourth, it is said that the Chinese name division, in order to deprive the demon of freedom, try to see the daily use of outsiders, and use the name of the great man in his country, not to think of it as blasphemous, now with the public name of the prostitute, one can break the name of the theory, the second can reduce the wind of competition for fame, it is evolution, not degradation. To sum up simply, it actually reflects people's two different social mentalities: one faction believes that the Qinglou beauty pageant is a sign of people's ideological corruption and degeneration, and the blatant use of the name of the president by the qinglou woman is simply blasphemous and sacred. One faction believes that the Qinglou beauty pageant just expresses dissatisfaction with the president of the Republic of China, because he was not elected through real democracy, and in addition, the Qinglou beauty pageant is actually a reversal of the traditional hierarchical system, representing the voice of freedom. In fact, the views of the two schools reflect the fierce collision of people's old and new ideas in the process of China's transition from old to new at that time. Qinglou beauty pageant, originally a hobby of literati and scholars, represents the aesthetic taste of the literati, although in this activity, many people indulged in the noise and dreams of the Qinglou beauty pageant, but in hindsight, it is a new thing after all, quite the first to lead the trend.