Joy of Life
庆余年
Two seasons (46 episodes in 2019, 36 in 2024) of historical-fantasy adventure about a modern man in a rank-bound empire, asking what "all people are equal" is worth there.
Save- Premiere
- Nov 26, 2019
- Episodes
- 83
- Where to watch
- CCTV, Tencent Video
- Also known as
- Qing Yu Nian
About the drama
On the surface, Joy of Life (庆余年, Qing Yu Nian) is a power fantasy. A young man arrives in an ancient empire carrying twenty-first-century memories, and the world keeps rewarding him for it. He rises fast in a court built to keep people like him down.
Underneath, the same scene keeps repeating: the hero pushes against rank, and rank pushes back. The question of what "all people are equal" is worth in a place where birth decides almost everything runs through the structure of the story, and it is the best reason to watch both seasons.
The two seasons arrived five years apart: Season 1 in 2019 on Tencent Video (腾讯视频) and iQIYI (爱奇艺), with 46 episodes, and Season 2 in 2024 on CCTV-8 and Tencent Video, with 36.
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Fan Xian (范闲) is born in the empire of Southern Qing and raised by his grandmother in a provincial town as the illegitimate son of a minister. He remembers a life in the twenty-first century. After an assassination attempt he travels to the capital to learn who his mother was and why anyone wants him dead.
His mother, Ye Qingmei (叶轻眉), turns out to have been a celebrated inventor, founder of the empire's spy agency and of its royal treasury, killed shortly after he was born. In the capital he meets Lin Wan'er (林婉儿), the frail daughter of the Princess Royal, whom the emperor has chosen as his bride so that he will one day take over the treasury his mother created.
He is drawn into the contest between two princes and into the Inspection and Control Bureau (监察院, jian cha yuan), the empire's secret-police organ. He means only to "enjoy life", and the plot slowly takes that option away.
The series is adapted from the web novel by Mao Ni (猫腻), directed by Sun Hao (孙皓) from scripts by Wang Juan (王倦). Season 1 won two Magnolia Awards (白玉兰奖) in 2020.
The idea of equality sits in the premise. Fan Xian comes from a world of formal equality and lands in one where status is the first fact about a person. In Season 2 he takes up his mother's ideal of a "fair society", but pursues it largely through the favour of very powerful men.
Season 2 was received unevenly. China News Service reported that it opened on a Douban (豆瓣) score of 7, against 7.9 for Season 1. Reasons given include the weight of expectation after five years, a slow opening, comic beats that sit uneasily with palace politics, two recast roles and heavy advertising, about nine ads per episode early on according to Jiemian. Opinion warmed around episodes 8 and 9, when the scheming plot returned.
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