Before A Love Never Lost: Who Is Chun Xia?

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On April 3, 2016, a 23-year-old from Kunming was named Best Actress at the 35th Hong Kong Film Awards. The field that year included Tang Wei (汤唯) and Sylvia Chang (张艾嘉). The winner was Chun Xia (春夏), for her first major film role, in Port of Call (踏血寻梅).

If you have just watched A Love Never Lost (人生若如初见) and are wondering who plays Xie Shuhong opposite Li Xian (李现), this is where her story starts. It is also the story of a career that went quiet for a while, and of a drama that took nearly three years to reach its audience.

Not an outsider to C-drama

Born in Kunming, Yunnan, in 1992, she works under the stage name Chun Xia — literally "spring and summer" — and is credited internationally as Jessie Li. The name began as her username on Douban, the Chinese film and book site, and it was a Douban acquaintance, a screenwriter, who encouraged her to act and invited her to Beijing.

She started in television, not film. Her first part was a girl who could not speak, and by 2015 she had played supporting roles in a run of series, including My Passionate Heart (我心灿烂), My Doctor Husband (我的博士老公), Lovers & Couples (伙伴夫妻) and The House That Never Dies (朝内八十一号). Longtime C-drama viewers may have seen her years before they learned her name.

Port of Call: the role that made her

Philip Yung's (翁子光) Cantonese-language crime film draws on a real Hong Kong case from 2008. Aaron Kwok (郭富城) plays a veteran detective trying to understand how and why a 16-year-old girl from the mainland, Wang Jiamei, was killed. Chun Xia plays Jiamei, and the film slowly rebuilds the life she had before. By her own account, she took the part because she had no other work at the time, and the film was shot in about 20 days.

It is not a glamorous part, and it is the one that put her on the map. Beyond the Hong Kong Film Awards win — one of seven for the film that night — it earned her Best Actress from the Hong Kong Film Critics Society and at the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival, Best Newcomer at the Asian Film Awards, and a Golden Horse nomination for Best New Performer.

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Film work followed: Ann Hui's (许鞍华) wartime drama Our Time Will Come (明月几时有, 2017), Dude's Manual (2018), and the fantasy blockbusters Monster Run and The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity (both 2020).

A Love Never Lost

A Love Never Lost is a 40-episode iQIYI period drama set as the Qing dynasty gives way to the Republic. Chun Xia leads it with Li Xian, alongside Wei Daxun (魏大勋) and Zhou You (周游), with Zhu Yawen (朱亚文) in a special appearance. It was her first lead role in a TV series.

She plays Xie Shuhong, a young woman from a well-off family whose life becomes tangled up with the revolutionaries of her time. Shuhong's story takes her abroad and through one setback after another, and she keeps going regardless. It is the kind of role Chun Xia does well: stubborn, unsentimental, and harder than it looks.

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A three-year wait

The drama's route to the screen was unusually long:

• July 2022 — A Love Never Lost was pulled on the day it premiered. iQIYI said only that it was postponed for "technical reasons"; some commentary at the time pointed instead to its portrayal of the late Qing aristocracy.

• November 2022 — During the protests that followed a deadly apartment fire in Urumqi, Chun Xia reportedly reposted a message on Weibo urging adults to protect the young people speaking out. The posts were later deleted.

• January 2023 — It was reported that a segment she was expected in did not appear in CCTV's Spring Festival Gala, and that her name had been removed from the promotional credits of Theory of Ambitions (风再起时), in which she had a cameo. No official explanation was given.

• May 2025 — A Love Never Lost returned to iQIYI in an edited version. At least one outlet linked the long delay to her case.

She does not talk about those years directly. But she says that when work and life have not gone her way lately, she tells herself: "The world isn't wrong, and neither am I."

In her own words

In August 2025, Chun Xia joined the Chinese podcast Zhankai Jiangjiang (展开讲讲, "Let's Unpack It") for a long conversation built around Shuhong.

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Looking back five years after filming, she said she deliberately keeps some distance from the character, seeing Shuhong less as herself than as a younger sister she watches over. She talked about building a playlist for each role, and about how her idea of love has changed: in her twenties she thought of it mostly as giving, and only later saw that loving the people around her was also something she needed. "Love is a decision," she says.

She also reflected on how Port of Call and A Love Never Lost each marked a different stage of her life. The first came when she was, by her account, sharp-edged and defensive; the second, she says, taught her to stay in relationships and work through problems rather than run from them. Near the end, asked whether she still wants to be Chun Xia, she said she feels "more Chun Xia" than when she first chose the name.

Where to watch

• A Love Never Lost streams on iQ.com, iQIYI's international service, with English subtitles.

• Port of Call availability varies by region; check JustWatch for your country. Hong Kong's M+ museum screened a restored director's cut, 22 minutes longer than the theatrical version, in 2026.

• The Way Out (阳光照耀青春里), released in mainland cinemas on April 4, 2025, is a darkly comic ensemble film set in a psychiatric rehabilitation hospital, co-starring Xiao Yang (肖央) and Jiang Qiming (蒋奇明).

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Ten years on from that night in Hong Kong, the best-actress win does not look like a peak she fell from. It looks like the start of a career that she is still running on her own terms.

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Sources: Wikipedia (Jessie Li, Port of Call, 35th Hong Kong Film Awards); Zhankai Jiangjiang (Episode 80); Beijing News (The Way Out); M+ (Port of Call).