Despite attempt at facial hair, Yao Ming still top Chinese celeb

Yao Ming is tall. He is also good at basketball. We already told you that. He is also China's top celebrity, three years running, according to Forbes. The list takes into account all that is important in life: income, television appearances, newspaper mentions, magazine covers, internet searches, and the like. (Hmmmm. We do a lot of internet searches and we weren't ranked. Likely because we weren't born in Mainland China. Same reason why Jay Chou isn't on the list.)

Here is the 2006 top 10:

1. Yao Ming, basketball player (2005 rank: 1)
2. Zhou Xun, actress (7)
3. Zhang Ziyi, actress (2)
4. Zhao Wei, singer/actress (4)
5. Liu Xiang, hurdler (3)
6. Li Yuchun, Super Voice Girl (-)
7. Fan Bingbing. actress (10)
8. Chen Kaige, film director (-)
9. Sun Nan, singer (8)
10. Li Bingbing, actress (28)

Dropped out of top 10:
11. Liu Jialing, actress (9)
26. Zhang Yimou, film director (6)
NR. Wang Fei, singer (5)

CRIENGLISH.com expressed surprise that Jet Li was nowhere to be found in the top 100.

There is something else -- "Star of the Year" -- that was awarded to Fan Bingbing. We're not sure how this differs from the celebrity list, but it seems similar to what we reported on back in February.

Here are the entire 2006 and 2005 lists, in Chinese. We will use them as our draft cheat sheets for the Chinese Celebrity Fantasy Game, which we are hoping some website launches soon.