Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 163 “Natural” Curves: Breast-Binding and Changing Aesthetics of the Female Body in China of the Early Twentieth Century Jun Lei In 1931, Liangyou huabao (Young companion pictorial), one of the most popular pictorial magazines of Republican China, published a cartoon that sketches the models of changing feminine beauty (fig. 1). The cartoonist, Lan Weibang, through a series of drawings of statues that represent varying forms of the female body, lays out from right to left what he conceives of as the historically progressing standards of feminine beauty. Each of these statues is representative of a particular era: the platform on which the far right statue rests is inscribed with the words “era of the beauty of slender waist and bound feet,” the middle with the “era of the beauty of face,” and the left with the “era of the beauty of curves.” The figure on the right turns slightly toward her left, peering into an unrepresented past. The statue’s extremely small and pointed feet indicate that they have been bound, which fits standards of beauty in imperial China, and yet her constricted waist expresses a more European aesthetic, in which corsets and girdles were used to bind the waists of women. The thicker lines of her back and legs further emphasize the small size of her