The seeds for a groundbreaking Chinese TV period drama that recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of its first broadcast were sown on distant shores

When Wang Fulin visited London it was not Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, black taxis or red doubledecker buses that left the deepest impression on him. Instead, as he flew home to China, the picture fixed in his mind was a very Chinese red.

It was 1979, and Wang had just spent several days in the British capital with a delegation of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of China. They had visited the BBC at a time when the series Downton Abbey was still years away from even being an idea on a storyboard, but when the British broadcaster had already made a worldwide reputation for itself with its TV period dramas.

One of those was the 1967 adaptation of the John Galsworthy novel The Forsyte Saga, which ran in 26 parts and was broadcast all over the world, and of which Sarah Crompton of the Daily Telegraph in London has said: "It was not the first literary adaptation on TV, but it was longer and more ambitious than anything screened before, and it has come to represent every value and standard to which British TV has aspired ever since."

So when the filmmaker Wang visited the BBC that day, the idea that occurred to him was essentially this: "If the British can do it, why can't we?"

Wang says now: "They had adapted many world classic novels into TV series, and I wondered why we could not do the same with Chinese classics and have them shown worldwide."

What Wang specifically had in mind was the dazzling story and dozens of complex characters that make up the 18th-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. The novel is considered one of China's Four Great Classical Novels, alongside Water Margin by Shi Nai'an, Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, both written in the 14th century, and Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en, written in the 16th century.

Dream of the Red Chamber chronicles the downfall of the Jia family during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) against the backdrop of the country's social and political upheavals.

Earlier in his career Wang, now 86, had directed the nine-episode TV series Di Ying Shi Ba Nian, or 18 Years of the Enemy Camp, about Chinese Communist Party soldiers. The series came out in 1980, the first TV series made on the Chinese mainland.

"At that time, unlike Chinese film, which started in 1905, China's TV series production was in its infancy," Wang says. "When I proposed making a TV series based on Dream of the Red Chamber I ran into a lot of opposition."

He spent two years organizing auditions, searching for film locations and preparing scripts, and no expense would be spared in its making.

Whereas a typical Chinese TV series in those days cost 10,000 yuan to make, Dream See Show, page 15 of the Red Chamber had 5 million yuan lavished on it.

"But you can guess how incredibly difficult it was to get government funding," Wang says.

But his resolve was fortified by a strong sense of mission: He wanted to spread the knowledge of traditional Chinese culture and deepen the influence of the classic novel. To that end he invited a group of so-called redologists - experts on Dream of the Red Chamber - including Zhou Ruchang and Wu Shichang, to help write the script.

Apart from portraying the hundreds of characters in the novel, the 36-episode series would also offer a look at China in the philosophical context of Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.

In the auditions, which began in early 1983, Wang says he was not looking for top professional actors. What he wanted instead was people who the experts reckoned shared the physical traits of the characters depicted in the novel.

Many of the actors were amateurs from many different walks of life, sieved out by the core crew members, including Wang, the cinematographers and scriptwriters, and once chosen the actors went through months of rigorous training.

From 1984 to 1987 the production team traveled to more than 40 regions across China to do the filming.