Excitement mounted yesterday over NBA star Yao Ming's unborn baby when China's "talk show queen" Yang Lan said the hotly anticipated offspring is a girl.

Yang said in her column that Shanghai native Yao has turned from "a struggling basketball player" to "being a father of a baby girl in a few months' time."

She said the tallest center in NBA was excited when he "first heard his daughter's heartbeat on the monitor."

The gender of Yao's baby has been a captivating question for fans ever since the pregnancy of his basketball-playing wife Ye Li was reported. The news of the impending birth, leaked by a slip of the tongue by a former Ye teammate in January, was seen as a herald of a bright future for Chinese basketball.

The anticipation was not unprecedented. When Yao's parents, two local basketball players, were expecting his birth, media also pinned the high hopes on the family.

Yao and Ye both played on national teams. They got married in 2007.

Some fans have even started planning a celebration for the day when Yao's baby girl leads Chinese women's basketball to the championship of the 2028 Olympics.

The hopes were backed up by genetic data. Yao, at 2.26 meters in height, and Ye, at 1.9 meters, are very likely to have a girl who reaches at least 2.01 meters, according to a previous report.

Yet Ye's close friend Miao Lijie said the couple hoped the child was a boy, because they felt it might be tough to be an overly tall girl.

Knowing the baby is going to be a girl, the fans are more frantic now about her name.

Bloggers began to solicit naming suggestions from Netizens. Some suggested that the child should be named Yao Shibo, which means "world expo" in Chinese, because the baby will visit the world for the first time during the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.

Others voted for Yao Nier, pronounced the same as the NBA center Shaquille O'Neal, hoping that the girl could have O'Neal's strength.

The name Yao Yuchun gained most support.

Yuchun is the given name of Li Yuchun, a female Chinese singing star who has always been made fun of for looking exactly like Yao Ming.