Guardians of the Dafeng
大奉打更人
A 40-episode fantasy mystery from CCTV and Tencent Video: a modern police-academy graduate wakes up in a prison cell in the Dafeng dynasty and joins its night-watch investigators.
Save- Premiere
- Dec 28, 2024
- Episodes
- 40
- Where to watch
- CCTV, Tencent Video
- Also known as
- 大奉打更人-TVB版
About the drama
Guardians of the Dafeng (大奉打更人, Da Feng Da Geng Ren) mixes three things that rarely share a plot: a crime-solving procedural, a martial-arts world with magic, and a transmigration comedy. It premiered on December 28, 2024, on CCTV-8 and Tencent Video. It opens like a detective story, with a man in a cell, three days from exile and a family framed for theft, and widens into a world of rival schools of power.
The draw is the hero's approach. Xu Qi'an (许七安), played by Dylan Wang (王鹤棣), does not arrive with powers. He arrives with an investigator's habits and a modern grasp of how evidence works, and the early episodes make a case that those are weapons too. Liu Yijun (刘奕君) plays Wei Yuan (魏渊), the commander of the watch, and Tian Xiwei (田曦薇) is also in the lead cast.
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Xu Qi'an is a recent police academy graduate who wakes in a strange world of Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, demons and warlocks. He is in prison in the Dafeng (大奉) dynasty, his family has just been caught up in a theft of tax silver, and he is due to be exiled to a remote frontier town in three days. His second uncle, Xu Pingzhi (许平志, played by Yue Yang 岳旸), has been blamed for the stolen funds.
Xu uses what he knows of criminal investigation, mathematics, physics and chemistry to work out what really happened and clear his family's name. That earns him the attention of the dynasty's night watch, the Dagengren (打更人), an organization that answers directly to the emperor, and he joins it. At first he wants only to stay alive and live comfortably. His sense of justice keeps getting in the way.
The drama is adapted from the web novel of the same name by Maibao Xiaolangjun (卖报小郎君, "Newspaper-Seller Young Master," known in English as Paperboy), which finished serialization on Qidian (起点) in August 2021. A 打更人 is a night watchman who walks the streets sounding the hours of the night, and Dafeng is the name of the dynasty. Director Deng Ke (邓科) shot the series from July to December 2023, mostly at Hengdian World Studios, with some outdoor scenes in Xinjiang.
Yangzi Evening News (扬子晚报) cited Yunhe Data for 1.93 billion effective views in the first half of 2025. A second season was announced on November 3, 2025.
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