NEW PERSPECTIVE

A book on Shanghai which has been adapted for the stage is giving viewers a different view of the city. Yang Yang reports.

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.