The National Palace Museum has invited the highly acclaimed Peking opera actor Li Baochun to stage four episodes of the Chinese classical epic 'Monkey King' at the museum beginning October, in a special program featuring Peking opera and Chinese paintings. Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, museum director Chou Kung-shin said that the program is being presented because museum goers have shown great interest in seeing ancient Chinese still art and performance arts combined in one setting. Since early July when the museum first introduced the program 'New Melody from the National Palace Museum,' which features Chinese opera performances and complementary exhibitions, the museum's Wen Hui Tang auditorium has been packed with audience members of all age groups every Wednesday afternoon, said Chou. To satisfy the public's appetite for this unique way of enjoying paintings and performances, the museum decided to hold the 'Monkey King' opera and paintings display between Oct. 7 and Dec. 30., Chou said. The opera will feature a lot of acrobatic and stunts shows as well as an exhibition of 12 paintings depicting leading characters in the fiction 'Journey to the West', including the Monkey King. The opera takes its storyline from the fictional Chinese classical literary work, which is based on real events, about a Buddhist monk's journey to India to retrieve Buddhist religious texts during the Tang Dynasty. His travel companions and protectors were a monkey -the Monkey King, a pig, a river monster and a horse; of which the Monkey King was the most intelligent. One of the most acclaimed Chinese painters in the 20th century, Pu Ru (1896-1963), also known as Pu Hsin-yu, painted the legendary figures of the monk, known as Tripitaka (Tang Sanzang), Monkey King (Sun Wukong), Pig of the Eight Prohibitions (Zhu Bajie), Sand Awakened to Purity (Sha Wujing) and monsters and demons. Chou said that the museum has also designed a series of cartoon figures of the fictional characters for museum visitors to collect. Earlier this year, the museum held from July 8 to Sept. 23, a total of 12 performances of 'The Palace of Eternal Youth' which were presented by the Lanting Kun Opera Company. For that series of performances, museum curators organized an exhibition of drawings of the theme 'Ming Emperor visiting Sichuan' to complement the opera, which tells the tragic love story of Ming Emperor of the Tang Dynasty and his beloved concubine Yang. 