Body & soul

Lin Peiqu loves muscles and the Lord. Didi Kirsten Tatlow meets God's own bodybuilder

BODYBUILDING and Christ are Lin Peiqu's two passions. On a recent Thursday afternoon, with the sun shining weakly down on Beijing through a cloak of pollution, the 27-year-old Guangdong native rises from a curvy, purple Starbucks sofa and heads out of the dimly lit coffee bar. There, outside the Parkson department store in the Xidan shopping district, in the western part of the city, he hops nimbly onto a low wall and, looking around briefly, unzips his red tracksuit top. It's time for the photo shoot. If it were a Saturday night in a club, this is when the girls would start screaming.

With a business-like expression on his face, Lin begins a well-practised routine, in front of a gathering crowd of gawking, pale, unhealthy-looking shoppers. Standing at right angles to the camera, he turns his body and face towards the lens. His left arm is flexed at the elbow and his right hand grips his left wrist in a classic bodybuilders' pose. He applies effort: muscles bulge. His stomach looks as if it's been drawn with a ruler.

Lin's body is a smooth, walnut-brown that bespeaks his southern origins. Petite at 1.67 metres, he has the classic V-shaped torso that's supposed to set female hormones surging - wide, muscled shoulders and a broad chest that dwindles to pert hips you could practically cover in a hand-span.

First pose over, Lin drops to his knees. Pointing his behind towards the camera, he twists his body so his face is visible in profile and rests one elbow on a sideways-bent knee, forehead propped on his right fist, in a pose that brings to mind Rodin's sculpture The Thinker. It's another classic bodybuilder pose, this one intended to show off his moulded back muscles. And then we see it - holding his slightly protruding shoulder blades apart like outstretched arms and reaching up to the nape of his neck is a large tattoo of a crucifix. Lin Peiqu, bodybuilder and Christian, wants to spread the word of bodybuilding and God through mainland China, where an appetite for both is growing fast.

'Bodybuilding is the outside, but God is inside,' he says. 'I devote my life to bodybuilding. It's God's plan.'