Chinese Banned Erotic Classic
One of China's most famous ballet directors is testing the very limits of the country's strait-laced attitudes by adapting a notoriously pornographic book for the stage.
The Jin Ping Mei, or 'The Plum in the Golden Vase,' is a classic of Chinese literature from the Ming dynasty that has been banned ever since the 17th century because of its explicit sexual content.
Its first English translator, Clement Egerton, found himself so embarrassed by the 70 or so sex scenes in the book, which run the full gamut of perversion, that he rendered them in Latin.
However, a dance production of the book premiered on Friday to a sell-out crowd in Hong Kong, after Wang Yuanyuan took on the work.
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