The Longest Day in Chang'an: A Countdown That Maps a City

Why this one

The Longest Day in Chang'an (长安十二时辰) looks like a hero story. A condemned man gets one day to stop an attack on the capital of the Tang dynasty (618–907), the clock runs, and the city is lit with lanterns. A common comparison is the American thriller 24.

The show is more interested in the city than in the man. Each hour of the countdown opens another layer of Chang'an: the walled wards, the security office that watches them, the markets, the waterways, the underground. The hero, Zhang Xiaojing (张小敬), is a convict whom the system has already written off. He risks his life for a place that has no reason to remember him.

The drama premiered on Youku (优酷) on 27 June 2019 and ran 48 episodes, adapted from the novel by Ma Boyong (马伯庸) and directed by Cao Dun (曹盾). It won Magnolia Awards for cinematography and art direction, and at least one Chinese critic questioned the pacing of its second half.

The setup

The year is 744, the Tianbao era under Emperor Xuanzong, and the night is the Lantern Festival, the fifteenth of the first lunar month, when Chang'an lifts its curfew and the whole city goes out. Intelligence reaches the Jing'an Si (靖安司, "the Pacification Office", the city's security bureau) that a plot is moving against the capital. Li Bi (李必), a young official of the office, is racing the clock. He turns to Zhang Xiaojing, a prisoner under sentence of death, and offers him a day's reprieve to stop it.

Save

The structure is the point. Chinese time was counted in shichen (时辰, "double-hours"), twelve to the day, each two hours long. The series is built on twelve of them. Each episode covers about thirty minutes of the day, so two episodes make roughly one hour of story time. Cao Dun told TMTPost (钛媒体) in July 2019 that the team set out not to make an American-style "24" and that he could not shoot twelve shichen using minutes and seconds.

A city with layers

Chang'an in the show is not a backdrop that the characters pass through. It is the machine that the plot runs on, and the plot works by moving between its parts.

Save

Save

The Jing'an Si is the control room. Production designer Jin Yang (金杨) told the outlet Jiemian (界面新闻) in 2019 that the Jing'an Si set was built inside a 3,000-square-metre studio. The street grid is the second layer: the city was divided into 108 square wards, with straight avenues between them, and the main avenue, Zhu Que Street, ran roughly 120 metres wide, comparable to Beijing's Chang'an Avenue. Jin said the aim was to build streets at their true width, so that people on them look small, rather than to build something merely pretty. Chases through this grid read differently when you know the blocks are walled and the avenues are that wide.

Then come the Western Market, the lantern-festival crowds, and the buried layer: an underground quarter for people society has cast out, where Jin used darker colours. The art team also designed a mountain-shaped festival lantern with twelve lamp rooms, each holding a guardian figure for one double-hour, and the props department made more than a thousand lanterns in varied colours and shapes.

Save

Cao Dun has said the real protagonist is Chang'an itself, rather than any one person. The plot bears him out: Zhang Xiaojing's hours are a route through the city's layers, and the city's offices, merchants and rules decide what he can reach.

The art department is the star

At the Shanghai Television Festival's Magnolia Awards in August 2020 the drama won for best cinematography and best art direction, along with an award for international communication, according to China Daily.

Sets. The exterior city was built at the Xiangshan film studio, with filming running from November 2017 to June 2018. Jin Yang began preparing in Beijing in September 2016. The Jiemian interview with Jin puts the production cost at nearly 600 million yuan, with art and set construction the largest expense. Jin said the aim, set by Cao Dun, was to recreate one day of the Tang as faithfully as possible, working from archaeological finds and historical documents. The main palette is vermilion and white; the Hua'e Xianghui Tower (花萼相辉楼) carries the strongest colour, and the underground quarter is darker.

Costume. Cao Dun said that no costume was rented: much of the cloth was woven by the crew, and the patterns were printed and dyed in-house. He said he asked for no embroidery, because weaving and dyeing were what mattered in the period. The China Costume Restoration Team (中国装束复原团队), founded in 2007 and credited with about 400 reconstructed outfits and makeup looks, commented on the production. Hu Xiao (胡晓), head of its art group, described the crew as a conscientious one with small flaws, citing a High Tang look done in Late Tang style. He said the crew lacked makeup expertise and used videos of the team's models' hair and makeup as reference.

Save

Staging. The opening is a long take of about two minutes. Cao Dun said the team decided on long takes as far as possible, and that almost every shot was made with a large camera and none with aerial equipment, to keep the image consistent. A dedicated department handled the equipment problems this created.

A director from cinematography

Cao Dun came to directing from the camera. In a 2017 interview with The Paper (澎湃新闻), he is introduced as someone whose background is in cinematography: he shot the television dramas The Story of a Noble Family (金粉世家), Dwelling Narrowness (蜗居) and Wang Gui and Anna (王贵与安娜), or served as their director of photography, and was nominated for Best Cinematography at the 49th Golden Horse Awards for the film Love Is Not Blind (失恋33天). The interview, from November 2017, was about his fantasy series Sea of Clouds (海上牧云记), which he directed before this one.

The praise for the show is mostly about what the camera sees. The criticism is mostly about how the story moves. Writing after the finale in August 2019, the outlet PingWest (品玩) said the rhythm "slowed noticeably" after episode 20, singled out the heavy use of flashbacks (episode 38 is a flashback for its full length) and said much of the second half moves the plot "for the sake of moving it." The same review called the haste of episodes 30 to 46 understandable and the romance subplot a weak point. Separately, a trade-press report reprinted by Jiemian says the series was originally set at 60 episodes before it became 48.

Save

Douban (豆瓣), China's main user-review site, held the show at 8.5 on the night of 12 August 2019, when the finale aired. PingWest said most viewers were satisfied with or accepted the ending.

The cast: an actor, and an idol

The two leads pair an established screen actor with a young star from the idol world. Lei Jiayin (雷佳音) plays Zhang Xiaojing. Jackson Yee (易烊千玺), a member of the group TFBOYS, plays Li Bi; he was 17 during filming. Cao Dun said Youku's viewing data supported casting Lei, and that he chose Yee for Li Bi for his "literati bearing" (文人风骨).

Save

Around them, the cast includes Zhou Yiwei (周一围) as Long Bo (龙波) and Reyizha (热依扎) as Tan Qi (檀棋).

Where to watch

In China the series streams on Youku. Overseas, availability varies by region and changes over time: it appeared on Viki, Amazon and YouTube in 2019, but check what your region offers.

Overseas reception

Overseas coverage was modest but warm. The Curb, an Australian outlet, reviewed the series in March 2020 and called it an inventive imagining of Tang China, comparing the real-time structure to 24. The comparison fits the structure and misses what is distinctive: 24 is about an agency, and this is about a city.

Save