completely fascinated by van Gulik’s series, and thought that Chinese people must read such lovely novels that re-invented Chinese history and Chinese society. In 1981, he wrote an article entitled The Western Di gong’an that win universal acclaim (Kuaizhi renkou de xiyang Digong’an 脍炙人口的西洋狄公案) to introduce to the Chinese reader van Gulik’s series, and published it in Zhonghua dushubao 中华读书报 and later on Renmin Ribao 人民日报. These articles immediately aroused great interest in China. Magazines, newspapers and publishing houses wrote to Zhao Yiheng to pray him to translate van Gulik’s stories, but Zhao was too busy and asked his friend Chen Laiyuan 陈来元. After that, Cheng Laiyuan, his wife and two of his friends worked hard from the spring of 1981 until the summer of 1986, and finally all van Gulik’s stories were published in China under the title Di Renjie solves cases at the court of the Great Tang (Da Tang Di gong’an 大唐狄公案). In 1986, Chen Laiyuan and his colleagues also collaborated to the adaptation for Chinese television of a serial drama titled The Legend of the Detective Di Renjie (Di Renjie duan’an chuanqi 狄仁杰断案传奇), the first Chinese television drama based on Judge Dee. It was a twenty-five episodes detective drama adapted from Van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries. Each of van Gulik’s stories were adapted into one, two or three episodes, although some simplifications were made due to the small screen requirements. In 1996, another television drama titled The Legend Di Renjie and Wu Zetian (Di Renjie yu Wu Zetian Chuanqi 狄仁杰与武则天传奇, 1996) appeared in the Chinese television. Here Di Renjie’s representation resonates strongly with the old-age literary tradition of “pure officials” that had enjoyed enduring popularity in the past. Unlike the drama of 1986, this time great attention was paid to historical details and to the construction of the characters based on historical figures. Here Di Renjie is no longer a Western detective in the shoes of a Chinese official, he no longer lives in the “eternal China” described by van Gulik, but he reactivates the cultural icon of “pure official” who fights corruption and crimes. (see: L. Benedetti, Further definition of Di Renjie’s identity(ies) in Chinese history, literature and media, «Frontiers of History in China», 2017, 12(4), pp. 599–620.) In 2004, CCTV-8 aired a television series based on detective stories related to Di Renjie, under the title Amazing Detective Di Renjie (神探狄仁杰), starring Liang Guanhua as