Is Turandot a Vulcan?

Does every blogger have bits and pieces of unfinished posts lying around? Back when I was putting together "Star Trek: Virgil Says Don't Sleep" to the aria "Nessun Dorma," from the opera Turandot, I saved these posters of Turandot because I thought the Chinese dominatrixy heroine looked like the Vulcan T'Pring, Mr. Spock's betrothed from "Amok Time," (2nd row, below), but I never got around to posting them, thinking I wanted to write something about Cold War politics and Star Trek to go with them. But I didn't and I probably won't soon, so here they are.

People sometimes say Star Trek's "alien races" (how's that for loaded language?) stood in for Cold War-era powers. The received wisdom is that the Klingons were the Soviets, though I'm not sure they line up quite right. The Vulcans and the Romulans were projections of the Inscrutable Asian that existed in the 1960s Western mind-- the Romulans specifically representing the hostile Chinese. (Does that make the Vulcans Japanese?) Jim Kirk, of course, played for the Home Team. So, maybe the Chinese Turandot is actually a Romulan, like the commander from "The Enterprise Incident" (botttom row, below).