Another star was added to the "Chinese cosmos" last month when a shiny plastic tiara was placed on the head of a Johannesburg beauty queen.
Having won her country's heat, Kelly Murphy, 20, will be South Africa's first representative at the annual International Miss Chinese Cosmos Pageant.
The event's organisers have, for years, hosted regional pageants throughout the Americas, Australia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. This year, South Africa got a look in, too.
Regional winners will next month compete to be crowned Miss Chinese Cosmos at a glitzy finale in Zhuhai, Guangdong province. The pageant, which Hong Kong's Phoenix Satellite TV owns the broadcasting right to, celebrates the imagined ideals of a modern Chinese woman.
"You can only have a pageant in a society that has a stable, and relatively prosperous community," says Sandy Huang, the organiser of the South African event, in Cantonese.
She is a recent arrival in Johannesburg, having married a Chinese South African.