Photo provided to China Daily

"I love Beijing. It's a city with four clearly changing seasons. Hong Kong has only one season."

Her fondness for the city overrides the discomfort she faces with smog, she adds.

"Beijing is actually much better now than the time when I first made it here. I still remember seeing donkey－or horse-drawn transport in the streets. As a lot of coal was burned for heating, the sky always seemed gray at the time. It's much better now," Chau says.

Viewers can see her in the new TV drama, Exceedingly High Road, which premiered on Beijing Satellite TV on Jan 23. She plays a winery manager, who fights to avenge the death of her beloved twin sister.

Still hailed as "a goddess" by her followers on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Chau is among the rare breed of showbiz celebrities to appear in public without makeup.

A series of Chau's selfies on her personal microblog that go with a self-spoofing caption, "Can that be a goddess?" attracted more than 1,000 comments and some 5,100 "thumbs-up" clicks on last count.

At a recent news conference, when she was asked about her beauty secret, she said: "Aging is a natural process. No one can avoid it. I don't pay that much attention. Actually, before coming to the conference, I even ate fried chips."