Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, the ballet Red Detachment of Women was adapted to a Beijing opera.
This Chinese period drama series follows the fortunes of a prominent merchant family engaged in Traditional Chinese Medicine during the waning years of the Ching dynasty. The affairs of this family of doctors/pharmacists (which in those days were one and the same) are intimately linked with social upheavals of the time such as the encroachment of Christian missionaries and foreign imperialism as well as conflicts that inevitably emerge in a large upper class family. Comparable in scope and production value to such recent titles as "Downton Abbey", the lives and character of both masters and servants intertwine in plot lines that spans more than a generation.
Dream of the Red Chamber, first released in 1987, was a television series produced by CCTV, adapted from the classic 18th century Chinese novel of the same name. It gained enormous popularity for its music, cast, and plot adaptation, being regarded by many within China as being a near-definitive adaptation of the story.
