For the sake of history

Chau Hoi Mei plays the female lead in the new TV drama, Exceedingly High Road. She stars in the popular TV series, The Empress of China.

She appeals to authorities to give more support to such historically themed shows and allow "more creative space" to makers of such period dramas.

Aside from acting in the TV series that has Chinese film star Fan Bingbing in the lead role of Empress Wu Zetian, Chau is now promoting her upcoming comedy film, Hot Blood Band.

Chau rose to fame after participating in the Miss Hong Kong pageant in 1985. Although she failed to win it, she soon found work in a slew of popular TV serials, including Looking Back in Anger. The show premiered in 1989 and went on to become one of Southeast Asia's most widely viewed TV programs in the 1990s.

At the peak of her career, Chau was a hot TV star to millions of fans across the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Today, she has begun to enjoy a more relaxed pace of life in Beijing, working on an average of two to three productions a year, according to her agent Zhang Wenyu.

Beijing has been her home for more than a decade. And it wasn't the lure of money that drew her to the Chinese capital, she says.

"I shot dramas on the mainland as early as 1998, when the renminbi was worth less than the Hong Kong dollar. So it's not the money that made me want to settle down in Beijing," she says.