Blossoms Shanghai

The year is the early 1990s. Ah Bao (阿宝, played by Hu Ge, 胡歌) is a young man in Shanghai's trading world who rises to become "Boss Bao" (宝总, Bao Zong). The series sums up his method as foreign trade in one hand and stocks in the other.

Three women stand around him. Ling Zi (玲子, Ma Yili, 马伊琍) is his partner in a Shanghai-cuisine restaurant called Night Tokyo. Miss Wang (汪小姐, Tiffany Tang, 唐嫣) works at a foreign trading company and backs his business. Li Li (李李, Xin Zhilei, 辛芷蕾) is a mysterious newcomer who opens a restaurant on Huanghe Road, which unsettles the whole street and Ah Bao's business. His adviser is the older Uncle Ye (爷叔, Ye Shu, played by You Benchang, 游本昌), and a powerful investor from the Shenzhen stock market, Mr. Qiang (强总), is a threat in the background.

The story is set in Shanghai after China's reform and opening up, when the stock market and foreign trade were opening quickly. The production rebuilt Huanghe Road at full scale and shot for roughly three years, according to Hu Ge in an interview with Beijing News in January 2024.

The source is Blossoms (繁花), the novel by Jin Yucheng (金宇澄), which won the Mao Dun Literature Prize. Written largely in Shanghainese, it runs across about forty years and has 31 chapters without a single continuous plot. One word recurs more than a thousand times: bu xiang (不响, "no sound"), the narrator's way of leaving things unsaid. Wong has called it his key to the adaptation: what he could not or would not say, he left blank.

He has also said the novel never explains how Ah Bao became Boss Bao overnight, so the series fills that gap and does not try to reproduce the whole book.