IAN HENSCHKE: There are eighteen bodies on display in this extraordinary exhibition. They all come from the Tianjin Natural History Museum, about a hundred kilometres south of Beijing. And one thing you'll notice about all the exhibits is how realistic they are.

Take a close look at the eye. The eyes look real because they are. There are eighteen real human bodies on display - all adults between twenty-five and fifty who died prematurely from heart disease, cancer and smoking-related illnesses. Each of them has been preserved by a process called plastination.

WAYNE CASTLE: Water fluids and fats in the body are replaced by a polymer, a plastic. And that's all the way through - it's not just a plastic coating on the outside, it's quite pervasive and replaces all the water in the body.

Finally they are posed, put into different positions, encapsulated into a big cocoon and a gas is pumped in, which basically is the second part of the polymer, and causes the hardening. And what you see is basically the result of that.

IAN HENSCHKE: The process of plastination was invented by an eccentric German called Gunther von Hagens thirty years ago. He's been called a 'rogue anatomist' by his critics.

He was recently the subject of a somewhat damning documentary which also called him a 'modern Frankenstein'. His travelling exhibition has been seen by more than eight million people in Europe, America and Japan, and has some shocking elements such as a man holding his own skin.

GUNTHER VON HAGENS: Some people have accused me of putting on a freak show but I don't think that it is.

IAN HENSCHKE: The work for the Australian exhibition is more educational and less shocking but it's also being carried out at the Dalian University in China, the same city where Gunther von Hagens set up his plastination business in 1999, after twenty years of clashing with the scientific community in Germany.

Now the world's biggest anatomical factory is set up there, with hundreds of dissectors working on-site to supply plastinated bodies to the world. The Australian exhibition has been valued at twenty million dollars. And although the bodies were plastinated at Dalian, it is totally separate from von Hagens's travelling show.

My knowledge of human anatomy, like most people's, is pretty basic - just what I remember from biology books at school and the odd glance at a diagram on the wall of my doctor's rooms. But spend an hour or two wandering around this exhibition and your whole understanding of who you are and what you are is changed forever.

WAYNE CASTLE: People don't know what to expect when they come to the show. They think they're coming to see dead bodies and a lot of them think it's going to be a lot more confronting than it actually is. And when people get here, they're more in awe of what they see, rather than shock or horror.

So to do something like this, you're using more than twenty different muscles, forty different tendons and more than sixty different nerves. It is really quite a remarkable process.

IAN HENSCHKE: Wayne Castle is the event organiser. He has a degree in anatomy himself and he gives people an introductory lecture on just what to look for when they go on their journey around the human body. One of the messages he has especially for teenagers who come on school tours, is to look closely to see the damage that smoking does to the lungs.

WAYNE CASTLE: And by the time you leave here today, you will be experts at determining who are heavy smokers from light smokers.

IAN HENSCHKE: They often say that smoking causes heart disease. Any signs of that?

WAYNE CASTLE: Not necessarily on that side but if you have a look on the other side - and we'll flip him over to see it. This is his aorta, this is a thoracic aorta, where the blood is actually leaving the heart here and travelling down to the rest of the body. You can actually see atherosclerotic plaques, or plaques of cholesterol, in there. They're quite marked. And these are the plaques that actually cause the damage - if they break away, they occlude the blood vessels. It is quite a marked occlusion.

IAN HENSCHKE: So, really, this person would've been... ..probably died of...

WAYNE CASTLE: Emphysema and cardiac disease.

IAN HENSCHKE: The two-year tour of Australia will finish at the end of 2007, and then The Amazing Human Body exhibition will return to Tianjin where it will remain on permanent display.