Chinese actress Bobo Gan Tingting has beaten many big names including Fan Bingbing to play the role of the adulterous Pan Jinlian.

She will be playing the character in a large-scale television series entitled Water Margin to be produced by Tianjin Film Studio.

Other stars in the series include Zhang Hanyu as Song Jiang, Hu Dong as Lin Chong, Du Chun as Ximen Qing, Ray Lui as Chao Gai and Anita Yuen as Lin Niangzi.

With only five years' experience in acting, the graduate of the popular The Central Academy of Drama is all set and confidence to play the character of China's number one adulteress.

Gan, 24, said she had read the book and other relevant stories for more than 30 times to understand the character.

"I am trying to bring out the story behind the role such as what caused her to be an adulterous woman and what would have happened if she had married Wu Song.

"She was just an ordinary innocent housewife in the beginning," she said.

Over the decades, dozens of actresses including Hu Jing, Joey Wang, Lam Kit-ying and Gigi Lai have played the role but Gan was described as the most beautiful Pan Jinlian.

Gan won the Best Actress award in Vietnam's Golden Kite Awards for her role in the Vietnam-China movie Hanoi, Hanoi in 2007.

Pan is a character in Water Margin, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, which tells the story of the trials and tribulations of 108 outlaws during the Song Dynasty.

She had attempted to seduce her brother-in-law Wu Song, a tiger-slayer hero, but failed.

She then entered an extra-maritial affair with the rich and lustful merchant Ximen Qing. She eventually murdered her hawker husband Wu Dalang and became the fifth mistress of Ximen Qing.

The hypersexual Pan had also fed Ximen Qing with aphrodisiacs which led to his death.

Her affair with Ximen Qing also appeared in another classical novel Jin Pin Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), once a banned phonographic book.