DALIAN, China — Tucked away in the back of this coastal city’s export-oriented manufacturing zone is a place that can only be described as a modern mummification factory.
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Workers at the Institute of Plastination in Dalian, China, prepare a body for display. Several such facilities have opened in China in recent years.
Inside a series of unmarked buildings, hundreds of Chinese workers, some seated in assembly line formations, are cleaning, cutting, dissecting, preserving and re-engineering human corpses, preparing them for the international museum exhibition market.
“Pull the cover off; pull it off,” one Chinese manager says as a team of workers begin to lift a blanket from the head of a cadaver stored in a stainless steel container filled with formalin, a chemical preservative. “Let’s see the face; show the face.”
The mastermind behind this operation is Gunther von Hagens, a 61-year-old German scientist whose show, “Body Worlds,” has attracted 20 million people worldwide over the past decade and has taken in over $200 million by displaying preserved, skinless human corpses with their well-defined muscles and sinewy tissues.
But now with millions of people flocking to see “Body Worlds” and similar exhibitions, a ghastly new underground mini-industry has emerged in China.
With little government oversight, an abundance of cheap medical school labor and easy access to cadavers and organs — which appear to come mostly from China and Europe — at least 10 other Chinese body factories have opened in the last few years. These companies are regularly filling exhibition orders, shipping preserved cadavers to Japan, South Korea and the United States.
Fierce competition among body show producers has led to accusations of copyright theft, unfair competition and trafficking in human bodies in a country with a reputation for allowing a flourishing underground trade in organs and other body parts.
Here in China, determining who is in the body business and where the bodies come from is not easy. Museums that hold body exhibitions in China say they have suddenly “forgotten” who supplied their bodies, police officials have regularly changed their stories about what they have done with bodies, and even universities have confirmed and then denied the existence of body preservation operations on their campuses.
Human rights activists have attacked the exhibitions, calling them freak shows that may be using the bodies of mentally ill people and executed prisoners. In June, the police in the city of Dandong, about 190 miles northeast of here, discovered about 10 corpses in a farmer’s yard. The bodies were being used by a firm financed by foreigners, the government said, that was illegally involved in the body preservation business.
Worried about a growing trade in illegal bodies, the Chinese government issued new regulations in July that outlawed the purchase or sale of human bodies and restricted the import and export of human specimens, unless used for research. But it is unclear how the regulations will affect the factories.
Premier Exhibitions, one of the world’s largest exhibition companies and the creator of “Bodies: The Exhibition’’ — now showing at the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan — declined to comment, saying it had not yet reviewed the regulations.
But Dr. von Hagens said he welcomed the new regulations, noting that they would not prevent him from doing business because he operated a research institute and his exhibitions rely mostly on European donors rather than Chinese bodies.
The new regulations, however, could prevent Chinese bodies from being exported from China to exhibitions in the United States, putting at stake possibly tens of millions of dollars.
Premier Exhibitions, a publicly listed company based in Atlanta that created the “Titanic” artifacts exhibitions that began in the 1990’s, recently agreed to pay $25 million to secure a steady supply of preserved bodies from China. Despite the new risks associated with procuring bodies and the prospect of saturating the market, Premier is still betting that the body shows will expand around the world.
“Our body exhibitions will probably surpass ‘Titanic,’ ” which was seen by 17 million people worldwide,” said Arnie Geller, the chief executive of Premier. “And it will probably do that in half the time.”
Experts say exhibitions featuring preserved bodies are now among the most popular attractions at American science and natural history museums. While the shows have not appeared at two of the most respected museums — the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History in New York — they have appeared at major museums in Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles.