It was in 2003 that Huang, an actor and film director, discovered Wuzhen's charms and was instantly smitten with them, and at that Beijing dinner he imagined the town as a giant stage - a setting for a theater festival.

"What about setting up a theater training center or a theater festival in Wuzhen?" Huang, then teaching at the Beijing Film Academy, blurted out to his dinner companions, with the enthusiasm of someone experiencing a eureka moment.

"You can say or do silly things when you have had too much to drink," Huang says now, "so I really didn't take my own idea that seriously. On the other hand, after that I could never quite shake off the idea and was constantly thinking about it."

Huang would have plenty of opportunities to do just that, because after arriving in Wuzhen for the first time, to direct and star in a TV series called Lost Time, he opened a bar in the town named after the series, and he was a frequent visitor.