CHINESE CHARACTERS look dramatic and beautiful, and have a powerful visual impact, but make sure you get the meaning of the characters straight before jumping right in.

There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany’s top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a strip club on the front page of its latest journal.

The journal hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special China issue of the Max Planck Forschung journal, but instead it ran a text basically saying “Hot Housewives in action!” on the front of the third-quarter edition.

The strip club’s “enchanting and coquettish performance” was set to begin in coming days.

The use of traditional Chinese characters and references to “the northern mainland” seem to indicate the text comes from Hong Kong or Macau, and it promises burlesques by pretty-as-jade housewives with hot bodies for the daytime patron.

Publication of the journal caused some anger among touchier webizens once the real Chinese meaning became clear, but generally sparked much amusement among online readers, and the Max Planck Institute was quick to acknowledge its error.

“To our sincere regret . . . it has now emerged that the text contains deeper levels of meaning, which are not immediately accessible to a non-native speaker,” the institute said in an apology.

The journal has since been updated online and now contains the title of a book by the Swiss Jesuit, Johannes Schreck (1576–1630). The Jesuit text in question was “Illustrated Explanations of Strange Devices”.