[2] Cheng's father initially worked in a textile store which closed later, forcing him to sell newspapers in order to feed his family.
[4] At the age of sixteen, Cheng became an apprentice in a watchmaker shop called Hope Brothers and Company in Shanghai, where he borrowed influential books and being taught horror and romance fictions in writing from a colleague.
[1] Cheng took night classes to learn English, which allowed him to read foreign novels by writers like Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils.
Later, he came across Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in the Shi Wu Bao Newspaper, which inspired him to write detective stories of his own.
Later, he started to publish more famous detective stories such as "Cat's Eye"; "The Shoe"; "The Other Paragraph"; "The Odd Tenant"; "The Examination Paper" and "On the Huangpu", which were all collected in the Huo Sang Series.
[11] It is clearly to be seen from the adaptation, Cheng Xiaoqing does not completely rewrite the novels; rather, he redesigned the plots based on film features and audience psychology in order to attract more viewers.