Nude women and Peking Opera: pornography or art?

A selection of photos taken 10 years ago about Peking Opera is now stirring a debate on the Internet. In these six black and white pictures, the female characters are naked.

Every photo's theme is a well-known story of Peking Opera, but the pictures show the male characters in costume and the naked females posing intimately with them. And it's the nude women who are the focus of the viewers' attention, rather than the Peking Opera costumes. The purpose of these photos is not clear but people speculated where the photographs first appeared.

The first guess is that these photos are murals of a Beijing pub. The first Internet posting of these pictures appeared in August 2005 and the poster revealed the pub was going to be sold around that time. However, he did not mention the name or location of the pub.

Many web surfers were angry at these photos because of the combination of nude women and Peking Opera. Some said they would never go to the pub with these painted murals, saying that they ruined the reputation of China' s traditional art. Others thought these photos were pornographic. But there were also countless web viewers inquiring about the location of the pub.

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