Art historian Di Wang, recorded at Gresham College in London, traces how the nude female body became a battleground in China's transition from empire to republic. She opens in 1919, when nude models first appeared at the Shanghai Art Academy, and follows the backlash that led a warlord government to ban them in 1925. Wang sets painting debates alongside medicine and science, from an 1851 Chinese anatomical treatise to 1892 depictions of undressed female bodies, showing how eugenics and ideas about racial fitness shaped attitudes toward the body. She covers breast-binding bans, the 1927 Wuhan women's emancipation parade, and the career of Pan Yuliang, who rose from a brothel to become China's first female art professor before facing an attack on her work at the 1941 Paris Salon. The lecture closes by tracing the nude debate's resurfacing in Beijing in 1979, linking a century of art controversy to shifting ideas of nationhood and modernity.