BEIJING -- A trial involving China's largest pornographic website, which boasts more than 600,000 registered members, began on Wednesday.

Nine creators and organizers of the website, Qingseliuyuetian, meaning "pornographic summer", are being sued at the Taiyuan Intermediate People's Court, in north China's Shanxi Province.

Apart from one who is over 50, the average age of the other eight suspects is just 23.

A member of the public complained to city police on June 21 last year that a hospital website had changed to become the homepage of a porn website.

The police then found the administrator of the website named Wang Jianfei and during the interrogation Wang admitted he was in charge of "Qingseliuyuetian" Taiyuan section.

Three months later, police in the provinces of Fujian, Guangdong, Jilin, Liaoning, Anhui and Hubei arrested Chen Hui, creator of the website, and other organizers.

Chen is alleged to have confessed that the site was opened in May 2004 and claimed to be "the largest Chinese adult community".

All the servers of the website were based overseas and Chen regularly changed the website's domain name, servers and IP address, the police said.

Chen and his partners are accused of renting ten servers in the United States in July last year and opening another three porn websites.

At first the four websites accepted about 200,000 registered members free of charge, but demanded 199 to 266 yuan (US$25 to 33) in registration fees from people who joined later.

Some people paid more for a life membership of the website. According to the police, a "top-level VIP membership" sold at 3,999 yuan (US$500).

At the same time, commercial space on the website sold for 1,000 to 3,000 yuan (US$125 to 375) per month.

On October 3 last year, when the website was closed down, the registered members exceeded 600,000 around China.

There were over nine million pornographic images and articles on the website and it had received more than 11 million clicks.

The police said it was difficult to know the exact illegal profits of the website because most of the money was spent or saved in Chen and partners' foreign bank accounts.

The police only found more than 200,000 yuan (US$25,000) in their accounts in China.