Zhou Yeling couldn’t wait until 7am for a long-awaited date with her favourite Englishman.

The 19-year-old from the city of Shanghai dragged herself out of bed at 5am to watch the third season premiere of Sherlock on the BBC’s website. Two hours later, the episode started showing with Chinese subtitles on Youku.com, a video website. Youku says it was viewed more than 5 million times in the first 24 hours, becoming the site’s most popular programme to date.

“I was excited beyond words,” said Zhou, a student in the central Chinese city of Changsha.

Sherlock has become a global phenomenon, but nowhere more than in China, which was one of the first countries where the new season was shown.

Online fan clubs have attracted thousands of members. Chinese fans write their own stories about the modern version of author Arthur Conan Doyle’s prickly, Victorian detective and his sidekick, Dr Watson, to fill the time between the brief, three-episode seasons.

In Shanghai, an entrepreneur has opened a Sherlock-themed cafe.

“The Sherlock production team shoot something more like a movie, not just a TV drama,” said Yu Fei, a veteran writer of TV crime dramas for Chinese television. Scenes in which Holmes spots clues in a suspect’s clothes or picks apart an alibi are so richly detailed that “it seems like a wasteful luxury,” Yu said.

Even the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily is a fan.

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