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

For Chinese writer Jin Yucheng, his novel Fan Hua is like a gift from the Muses. One day in 2011, when the then 59-year-old literature editor happened to walk under an overpass in Shanghai, he came across a female vendor.

"The woman used to be the most beautiful one around the Jing'ansi area in the 1960s. When I saw her, memories about at that time and the following decades suddenly flooded in," he says.

Then, he decided to post some stories about those times on a local Shanghai online forum, where people share gossip about the city.

For seven months from May 2011, he posted a new piece written in the local dialect almost every day.

Then, in 2012, Jin had some of his stories published by one of top Chinese literature magazines Harvest under the title Fan Hua (Those Many Once Flourishing Flowers).

In 2015, his work won the Mao Dun Literary Award.