China Lee Bio
China Lee is an American Playboy Bunny, actress, glamour and nude model. Born Margaret Lee on September 2, 1942, in New Orleans, Louisiana, she has also been credited as Margaret Sahl. Playboy named her its August 1964 Playmate at 21. Her appearance came during the 1960s, as Playboy grew into a major force in American magazine publishing.
Lee has natural breasts, brown eyes and black hair. Her measurements are 35-22-35.
China Lee broke new ground as the magazine’s first Asian American centerfold, her centerfold shot by veteran photographer Pompeo Posar. Pronounced “chee‑na” to rhyme with Tina, she brought an easy smile and a composed camera presence that registered at a moment when the pages were widening their register of looks and backgrounds.
Her roots were deliberately ordinary: the youngest of eight children of Chinese immigrant parents who ran a neighborhood laundry. Those early family rhythms—workaday, hands-on, communal—provide the plain counterpoint to the glamour that followed and explain the practical skills she carried into a working life built around service and performance.
Before appearing in the pages she had already learned the rhythms of public-facing work. She waited tables and trained as a hairstylist, then took the Bunny uniform on the road: Chicago and New York Playboy Clubs employed her as a Bunny and later as a traveling training Bunny, instructing recruits in the exacting, club-room routines the brand expected of its front-line staff.
Lee’s screen work was brief but memorable: she appears in Woody Allen’s comedy What's Up, Tiger Lily? with a closing striptease that punctuates the film’s cavalcade of sketched scenes. Decades after the clubs and the cameras, she spoke about family life in the early 1990s alongside her ex-husband Mort Sahl and their son, and she returned one last time for the 2004 retrospective Playboy: 50 Years of Playmates. Those moments—clubroom craft, a small film cameo and later documentary appearances—compose the record of a career that moved between private roots and the peculiar visibility of mid‑century American popular culture.
