About The Young Companion

The Young Companion

The Young Companion (Chinese: 良友; pinyin: Liángyǒu; literally "Good Friend"), known in Chinese as Liangyou Huabao, the Liangyou Pictorial, was a Chinese pictorial magazine published in Shanghai from February 1926 to 1945. Founded by Wu Liande of the Liangyou Books and Printing Company, it was the first large-scale comprehensive pictorial in China and — in the judgement of the historian Leo Ou-fan Lee — the longest-running large-sized pictorial journal in modern China. With captions in Chinese and English, large-format photography and covers that made film stars and modern women into national icons, it documented modern urban life, cinema, art, sport and current events for a national readership through 174 issues. Historian Yajun Mo has called it an "iconic magazine" and "a visual shortcut for 'old Shanghai'": no single periodical better preserves how Republican China saw itself becoming modern.

The magazine's English name, printed on its cover, translates its Chinese title loosely: liangyou means "good friend" or "good companion," and the editors played on the promise — the magazine presented itself, in its own early pages, as a good and constant companion in the daily lives of its readers, a friend to be greeted in the morning and read in bed at night. Behind the genial persona stood a serious publishing enterprise: the first Chinese company to specialise in photography-based printing, which built a small magazine empire on the pictorial's success.

Founding: Wu Liande and the Liangyou company, 1925–26

The Liangyou Books and Printing Company (Liangyou tushu yinshua gongsi) was established in Shanghai in 1925 by Wu Liande, a Cantonese businessman who had once worked for the Commercial Press — the giant of Chinese publishing — and who set out to follow in its footsteps with a company of his own, specialised from the start in photographic printing. Wu enlisted literary luminaries as editors, among them Zhao Jiabi, Zheng Boqi, Ma Guoliang and Zhou Shoujuan, and boasted in the company's expansion advertisements of "the creation of a new era in the field of printing," as the first publishing company to specialise in photography.

The flagship journal, Liangyou Huabao, published its first issue on 15 February 1926, its cover featuring the actress Hu Die (Butterfly Wu), the era's defining film star. Wu founded it, in the words of later chroniclers, with the purpose of "enlightening the people's wisdom and improving the standard of mass culture" through images, and it was welcomed as soon as it was listed. The timing was exact: camera and halftone printing had matured, Shanghai's cinema and advertising industries were generating a flood of images, and a mass urban public was ready to read the world in pictures.

The pictorial form

At first glance, contemporaries noted, Liangyou Huabao impressed by sheer size — larger than the Eastern Miscellany, it was a big-format pictorial that gave photography the full page. For a pictorial it carried a fairly heavy dose of written material, but its attraction lay in its visual features: rotogravure photographs of current events, film stills and stars, fashion, art reproductions, sports, city life and world news, captioned in both Chinese and English for a readership that reached beyond China to overseas Chinese and foreign observers.

The magazine defined a genre in China. Earlier Chinese pictorials, such as the lithographed Dianshizhai Pictorial of the 1880s, had consisted entirely of drawings; Liangyou was photographic, comprehensive and modern — "the first large-scale comprehensive pictorial in China," as its historians conclude, and a symbol of the arrival of visual mass media in Chinese life. Its editors understood the assignment as visual enlightenment: to mobilise the functions of the image, reporting Shanghai, China and the world from many angles, in a rich, lively, decent and stylish mass pictorial. Decency was a commercial as well as a moral choice: self-identified as a good companion to the reading public, the journal had to maintain a good reputation to keep its large circulation, and it steered its glamour accordingly.

Editors and the Liangyou stable

Wu Liande founded and directed the enterprise; editorship of the pictorial passed through distinguished hands. Liang Desuo joined in 1927 and Ma Guoliang thereafter, and the two constantly reformed and improved the magazine; the recorded editors across its run include Wu Liande, Zhou Shoujuan, Liang Desuo and Ma Guoliang, with Zhang Yiheng as editor-in-chief in its later period. Around the flagship the company built a stable of journals — a cinema monthly, Silver Star (Yinxing), among the first of its kind in China; a journal entitled Modern Woman (Jindai Funü); a weekly on the arts (Yishu Jie); and others — suggesting, as Leo Ou-fan Lee observed, that the company's chief commercial direction was arts and entertainment.

The company also became a major book publisher on the pictorial's profits and prestige, issuing famous collectanea including the Liangyou Collectanea of Literature, the Liangyou Repository and the Compendium of New Chinese Literature (Zhongguo Xinwenxue Daxi) — the last a landmark attempt to canonise the new literature of the May Fourth generation. The pictorial itself, meanwhile, appeared monthly through most of its life (reference listings record its frequency as weekly in its formal data, an indication of the varying rhythms of its early experiments), reaching its 171st issue by October 1941, with special issues — a Sun Yat-sen Memorial Special and an Eighth Anniversary issue — outside the numbered sequence.

Covers and the image of the modern woman

Nothing in the magazine is more studied than its covers. Across the run, 162 covers presented "cover girls" — film stars, socialites, athletes, artists, students and modern housewives — of whom only about fifty-two can be identified by name, because, as researchers note, for most women of the time showing one's face in public was still a brave and controversial act. The named minority trace the era's female celebrity: actresses above all, with socialites and celebrities, painters and the rare woman athlete completing the census.

What the covers meant

Scholars read the covers as the construction site of the modern Chinese woman. As the representative carrier of female discourse in concession-era Shanghai, the Young Companion played a significant role in forming the image of modern women — their dress, posture, work, sport and public presence — and its photographic images, scattered across its pages as well as its covers, provide abundant material for research into how that image was made. The first cover set the template: Hu Die, photographed, glamorous, modern, offered to a national readership as the face of the new age.

Content: a visual chronicle of the Republic

Inside, the pictorial did for the eye what the great general magazines did in text: it chronicled everything. Current events and politics, the cinema and its stars, art exhibitions and reproductions, sport, fashion, urban construction, disasters, ceremonies, and the life of the streets — Shanghai first, but also China and the world, photographed by the company's network and drawn from international sources. Positioned as an urban publication, it combined multidimensional content with a large body of advertising, and its historians conclude that studying the pictorial's history from 1926 to 1945 is, in a real sense, studying the history of modern China: its pages register the material and spiritual changes of the modernisation process as they happened.

The magazine radiated from Shanghai to the whole country and overseas. Its bilingual captions, its export of Shanghai style to the interior, and its coverage of world events made it at once a metropolitan product and a national textbook of modernity: for readers in smaller cities, Liangyou was the window through which the modern — the department store, the cinema palace, the stadium, the skyscraper — was seen and learned.

War, displacement and the final issues

The magazine's later years followed China's wartime geography. Published in Shanghai from 1926, it continued through the 1930s as tension with Japan deepened, and during the Second World War its production was displaced to Hong Kong and Chongqing, the wartime capital, as Shanghai fell under occupation. It reached issue 171 in October 1941; after the victory in the war against Japan, issue 172 appeared in October 1945. In total, 174 issues were published, including the two unnumbered specials. Publication ceased in 1945 — the pictorial's final issue is dated October 1945 — closing a run that had begun in the confident Shanghai of 1926 and survived, displaced and diminished, the eight years of total war.

Since 1945 the title has been repeatedly re-established, but, as its historians note, the impact has never been the same: the Young Companion belonged to a specific conjunction — photographic printing, Shanghai cosmopolitanism, a national audience hungry for images of modern life — that the postwar world did not reproduce.

Legacy and scholarship

The Young Companion's afterlife is as a primary source and a scholarly field. The Brill volume Liangyou: Kaleidoscopic Modernity and the Shanghai Metropolis, 1926–1945 (2013), edited by Paul G. Pickowicz, Kuiyi Shen and Yingjin Zhang, established the modern study of the magazine across a dozen scholarly perspectives; Leo Ou-fan Lee's classic account of Shanghai modernism rests substantially on its pages; and studies continue to appear — on its modern women, its advertising, its covers and its urban imagery — in every year. Its 174 issues are the research object of that literature entire: the longest-running large pictorial of modern China, preserved as the visual archive of the Republic's metropolitan age.

To open the Young Companion today is to see Republican China as it wished to be seen: brilliant, photographic, urban and young. That, precisely, is its historical value — and why a magazine founded to be a "good friend" to its readers has become, a century later, the standard visual shortcut to the world of old Shanghai.