In late January, scriptwriter Qin Wen visited Beijing to attend a meeting about her popular TV series, Blossoms Shanghai. Staying at a hotel located near the East Third Ring Road, she experienced a funny moment during dinner at the hotel restaurant.

As a waitress handed her the menu, she made an unexpected suggestion. "Would you like to try the stir-fried beef with rice noodles? It tastes the same way Boss Bao prefers."

Qin couldn't help but laugh. Boss Bao, aka Ah Bao, is the handsome, charismatic protagonist played by A-list actor Hu Ge on the show, which is arguably the most popular TV series at the moment.

As the first television drama by Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai, a legendary director known for classic movies like The Grand Master and Chungking Express, the 30-episode series concluded its first run on CCTV-8 last month, earning itself a huge fan base and becoming something of a cultural phenomenon.

Adapted from Shanghai writer Jin Yucheng's Mao Dun Literature Prizewinning novel, Fan Hua (Blossoms), the series — which primarily takes place between 1993 and 1994 — follows the journey of Ah Bao, an ambitious everyman opportunist who rises to become a legendary figure in the city's most elite commercial circles. Aside from emphasizing his ability to seize opportunities in the stock and foreign trade markets, the plot also follows his subtle, and ambiguously romance-like relationships with three women.

The craze the drama has stirred up has led to tourists flocking to the show's locations, such as the Fairmont Peace Hotel, which is where he rents a luxurious room to do business, and Huanghe Road, which was lined with the most high-end restaurants in the 1990s.

Other examples include fans waiting in long queues outside restaurants to order a plate of fried pork chops with rice cakes, a traditional Shanghai dish that Boss Bao always orders for his dinners with Wang Mingzhu (played by Tang Yan), one of the three principal female characters.

The drama's popularity even extends to its soundtrack. Jacky Cheung, one of Hong Kong's most famous singers, performed Steal One's Heart at his show in Quanzhou, Fujian province, on Jan 19.The song, which Cheung had only sung in public a few times since its release in 1994, was added to the concert after it was used to set the atmosphere during one particularly heartbreaking scene, lending it newfound popularity.

"Honestly, I didn't anticipate the drama would achieve such huge success," Qin says, during an interview with China Daily.

As a seasoned scriptwriter with over two decades of experience in the TV industry, Qin says that she was quite surprised to receive a call to write the script for Wong in 2017.

"I have been an ardent fan of his for many years. I was excited because it was a rare opportunity to meet my idol, but even then I wasn't sure if I would be picked in the end," she says.

Interestingly, when Qin walked into the meeting room and saw several middle-aged men in front of her, she momentarily failed to recognize Wong, who is famous for wearing sunglasses to public events, as he was only wearing a pair of ordinary glasses.

After working with the director for almost five years on Blossoms Shanghai — for which Wong acquired the film copyright in 2013 — Qin describes the project as the most time-consuming and exhausting of her career.

Normally, a writer finishes the script before the shoot and pays limited visits to the set. However, this norm completely changed while working with Wong, who is known for his deliberate filming pace, for rarely allowing actors to read the entire script before shooting, and for making frequent revisions on set.

"I believe that most of us working with Wong for the first time were curious and nervous to be part of the project. Personally, the scriptwriting process, which lasted almost five years, felt like climbing a mountain. You couldn't turn your head, otherwise you'd feel scared," says Qin.

For the first time in her scriptwriting career, Qin moved to live alongside the cast and crew on the set in suburban Shanghai during the three-year shoot between 2020 and 2022. She wrote temporary revisions to the script every night, per Wong's request, in preparation for the next day's filming.

Flashing through her mind as some of the most difficult and challenging moments, Qin recalls that she once stayed on the set until 2 am and walked alone on an empty street to deliver the revised script to Wong.

Despite the high-intensity schedule, Qin says she learned a lot from the prestigious director. Wong, who is energetic and a stickler for details, did a great deal of preparation and often slept only three to four hours a day.

"Wong Kar-wai is a bit like a babysitter. He read many books and documents about Shanghai in the early 1990s, enough to fill the shelves on four walls. He tagged sections in the books, to remind us to read the most important content and help us all, including the prop, costume and set designers, develop a better understanding," Qin says.

Considered by some critics as Wong's love letter to Shanghai, the city shot through his lens evokes a feeling that is both familiar and fresh. While showing landmarks like the Bund and the Oriental Pearl Tower, the drama also presents Shanghai's cityscape in a brighter and more radiant manner, as if the city has been burnished by the memory of someone who loves it deeply.

In an early promotional video, the 65-year-old Wong said that he had been born in Shanghai before moving to Hong Kong with his parents later. Having visited the city constantly over the past few decades, he has reconnected with many relatives, including his elder brother, sister, and over 20 cousins, and this experience became a driving force behind producing the drama.

For Hu Ge, who was born in Shanghai and graduated from the Shanghai Theatre Academy, the drama provided an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the city where he grew up and lived, he said during a recent seminar in Beijing.

"When I was reading Jin's novel, I wondered if I really was a Shanghai native. It seemed that my impression of the city was a bit shallow and one-sided," Hu says, explaining that he would even look online when asked by friends from other cities to recommend restaurants or things to buy.

Mentioning that many readers view the novel as an encyclopedia of Shanghai, Hu said that he feels that his perception of Shanghai has now become more three-dimensional, and he can understand the lives lived by his parents' generation.

Buxiang, a phrase that means "keeping silent" and which represents the concept of keeping a low profile in the Shanghai dialect, is one of the most frequently heard phrases in the drama. Ironically, the show's popularity has caused the phrase to make a loud splash, as some fans on major review sites like Douban, where Wong's drama has received a rating of 8.5 out of 10, have commented.