A three-season theater adaption of Chinese writer Jin Yucheng's work Fan Hua is touring the country. [Photo provided to China Daily]

When Hong Kong film director Wong Kar-Wei decided to adapt the novel for the screen, he told Jin that the 442-page novel did not seem naturally suited for film or TV play adaption. So, if all went well, the film would not be released until 2025.

But now, a three-part theater adaption of the work is in production, with the first one staged in Shanghai, and Beijing, where audiences had to read the subtitles while watching the three-hour play performed in the Shanghai dialect.

In the novel, fiction and gossip are woven together against the backdrop of two different decades-the 1960s and the 1990s. And as the title indicates, there are so many characters that it is difficult to focus on a single one or several without diluting the essence of the plot.

Many readers say the novel is like a modern-day version of A Dream of Red Mansions.

And when scriptwriter Wen Fangyi was first approached to turn the work into a film script, she was hesitant to accept it, she says.