Tsui Hark is set to direct Andy Lau in the period martial arts suspense thriller called Detective Dee and the Mystery of  the Phantom Flame in Hong Kong and China with shooting to begin in May.

Tsui plans to bring to life a fiction case solved by a real Tang Dynasty detective.

According to Hollywood Reporter, the story starts when the mysterious deaths of a series of loyal subjects threaten to delay the 690 A.D. inauguration of Empress Wu, China’s only female leader, she calls the infamous Detective Dee (Lau) back from an exile into which she cast him eight years earlier.

Apparently the two people, in real life, had a love, hate and passionate relationship. Wu was the last female Empress, who ruled very strong but was very smart in selecting  intelligent people for her cabinet. 

Dee agrees to the challenge and partners with gung-ho Commander Bei and the Ghost Doctor, a master of disguise, to solve the crimes. Tsui has yet to choose the actors to play the rest of the historical figures.