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.
She adds that in the rest of Africa, where Chinese migrant populations are smaller than that in South Africa, she could not find a single eligible entrant. The blunt reply she so often received was: "Never mind finding a pretty girl, you can't find a girl here at all."
Chinese in South Africa are estimated to number about 300,000. This includes migrants who arrived at the dawn of South Africa's democracy, in 1994, and as the country cemented its diplomatic ties with the People's Republic, in 1998. These mig-rants now dwarf in number the South African nationals of Chinese descent, who are a minority of an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 in a country with a population of 52 million.
The African pageant finalists mirrored those demographics.
Many third- or fourth-generation Chinese South Africans don't speak Putonghua or Cantonese and, as in Murphy's case (her mother is half-Chinese and her father is Irish), are often only part Chinese after generations of intermarriage, but all contestants treasure their Chinese heritage.
Finalist Tayla Lai Thom, 22, who doesn't speak a word of Chinese, says: "I am proud of being Chinese and I think my Chinese ethnicity is an advantage."
She could be spot on. There's a benefit in straddling these two worlds at a time when Beijing's horizons stretch to Africa - China, after all, is now South Africa's largest trading partner.
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