It’s Lindsay Lohan, seen on a poster advertising a magazine in the summer of 2011 in Beijing. The summers are hot in the Chinese capital. Temperature regularly hits 35 °C and can reach 40 on steamy days. Lindsay is properly dressed for the weather, but she still seems sweaty, and seemingly can’t wait to take it all down.
Back in 2011 this sort of sex-themed advertising was very common in China, just like scantily dressed girls on auto shows. Nowadays all this pretty is sadly no longer allowed. Lindsay Lohan was a movie-star, singer, and all-around peach the 2000’s. But she’s pretty old now. Her Chinese name was 林赛 · 罗韩 (Línsài Luóhán), a phonetic translation of her English name.
The poster hang on the wall of a roadside magazine stall. These were everywhere in Chinese cities. Selling magazines, newspapers, stamps, small snacks, drinks, and cheap toys. Today, in the age of the smartphone and 5G internet, they are largely gone and dead. Too bad. I loved these stalls. They had all sorts of weird magazines, about tanks, or about the off-shore shipping sector, or about local travel.
They also sold the more popular stuff, like the Chinese version of ‘For Him Magazine’, which had Lohan on the cover that month. The Chinese name is 男人, which simple means ‘men’. The magazine still exists, but the steamy covers disappeared after 2015.
Many of these magazine stalls were operated by China Post, the state-owned postal services. Each stall had a landline telephone number (65921129 on this one) and a stall-number (51034 on this one).
This particular stall was located next to the International Post Office, seen on the right, where one would go to post and collect parcels to and from abroad. In front of the stall a pink bike and a red electric scooter.
Bye Lindsay! Next time I’ll buy her an ice cream.