A feisty Chinese television director has dared to defy both the will of the people and China’s answer to Simon Cowell.

Hu Mei has crowned a year-long television search for the leads in the most famous novel of Chinese literature by revealing that she will go her own way.

“You can choose who you like, but I will direct as I like,” she said in an exclusive interview with The Times. Just days ago, Beijing Television announced the winners of a reality television show in which 236,000 would-be stars vied to play the protagonists of the 18th-century novel The Dream of the Red Chamber.

The plot involves the son of a family in decline, the beautiful, delicate and jealous girl he loves and the charming and practical cousin he is destined to marry. Written by Cao Xueqin, the scion of a once rich and illustrious family, the hero and two heroines are as familiar to every Chinese person as Macbeth, or Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, are to British audiences.

That has meant that the search for fresh young faces has gripped China’s television viewers since it was launched last August with a special show broadcast from the Great Hall of the People.

For each audition, watched by millions, a panel of five judges would ask the aspiring stars to act out various scenes from the novel or to reveal aspects of the characters they hoped to play. The judging system also involved the public voting via mobile phone.

It was so complicated that the Chinese media described it as more difficult than the Goldbach conjecture, the unsolved mathematical puzzle.

Contestants tossed out by the judges could return by popular vote. Others seemed to reappear just because they had good connections. Many made their way ahead with the help of financial backing.

The suspense ended with the announcement in mid-June that two unknowns, a minor opera actress and a film school student, would play the tragic Lin Daiyu and the abandoned Xue Baochai. But no actor has been found to take on the role of the hero, Jia Baoyu, who is born into a prosperous aristocratic family with a jade stone in his mouth and ends up as a Buddhist monk.

The director, Ms Hu, had always hinted that she was unhappy with the process of using a contest reminiscent of Pop Idol to select three of the most arresting characters of Chinese literature. She told The Times: “I think the results are not satisfactory. Maybe I will try them in my other television programmes and when I shoot Dream of the Red Chamber it’s possible that I may use them. But in the end maybe I will use none of them.”

The head of the five panel of judges, Zhou Ling, told The Times he had completed his task in the drama and had nothing more to say. However, he has said that casting the sensitive and sickly Lin Daiyu, a female literary character of rare depth, was tougher than finding a Hamlet.

Ms Hu, already famous for directing two highly successful costume dramas shown on state television in the past few years, has said that shooting the 50 episodes of a book that has not been televised since 1987 should not be treated as a game.

The actors in that series trained for three years before filming even began.

In the red chamber

— The novel has a cast of more than 400 characters who appear over the course of 120 chapters. It draws a detailed picture of the complexities of family life and social structures among the wealthy Chinese of the 18th century

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