The long-awaited Bruce Lee TV series starring Chan Kwok-kwan is finally set to begin airing in China this Sunday. Entitled ‘The Legend Of Bruce Lee’, the show cost a whopping 50 million yuan (US$7.3 million/ UK£3.5 million) and is surprisingly the country’s first retelling of the star’s life story.

The series is said to be extremely detailed in tracing Lee’s life, from his teenage years in Hong Kong to his move to the U.S., where he studied and taught martial arts, to his movie career and early death at the age of 32. The script was personally approved by Lee’s daughter, Shannon Lee who is also credited as an executive producer.

Actor Chan Kwok Kwan was chosen for the role of Lee as he possesses an uncanny physical likeness to the star and did an impressive job of spoofing Lee’s manerisms in ‘Shaolin Soccer’. Kwok-kwan believes that this new take on the Little Dragon’s life is easily the most detailed to date, even going so far as to reveal that he had a fear of cockroaches.

“We’ve only seen the glorious side of Bruce Lee - he comes out all guns blazing, his films are entertaining. But very few people know what injuries he suffered and what grievances he suffered,” said Kwok Kwan.

Lee’s message of Chinese strength in movies like ‘Fist Of Fury’ and ‘Way Of The Dragon’ also matches that of the Chinese government.

“Lee had strength, agility, pride, intelligence, not to mention charisma to burn, which coupled with the pro-Chinese rhetoric in his films have made him a potent symbol for the powerful new China that is now rising,” said Michael Berry, a professor in contemporary Chinese cultural studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“He wrote the word ‘kung fu’ into English dictionaries. He made people aware of China,” CCTV official Zhang Xiaohai said at a news conference Tuesday. The director, Jia Zhangke told the Associated Press he was one of the Chinese youngsters that belatedly found out about Lee by watching his movies on tape in the early 1980s at “video-watching parlors,” which he describes as “a room with 15 or 20 chairs.”

“I really liked them. He fights with great style. Boys like violence. There is nationalism in his movies — he’s always fighting foreigners. I was very happy watching the movies,” he said.

In an apparent effort to boost racial pride, the series was originally scheduled to be aired before the Beijing Olympics in August. However, it was pushed back in keeping with the period of mourning for the deadly earthquake in China’s central Sichuan province on May 12 2008, which killed 70,000 people.

Shot in China, Hong Kong, Macau, the U.S., Italy and Thailand over a nine month period, the series will run for 50 episodes with two episodes airing consecutively every night in a two-hour slot.