Legend of the Magnate
大生意人
A 40-episode late-Qing business epic on CCTV-8 and iQIYI about an exiled scholar who becomes a merchant king through banking, tea and salt, up against rival guilds and foreign traders.
Save- Premiere
- Nov 25, 2025
- Episodes
- 40
- Where to watch
- iQIYI
- Also known as
- The Tycoon · Легенда о магнате
About the drama
Legend of the Magnate (大生意人, Da Sheng Yi Ren, "the big businessman") is a costume drama where the weapons are ledgers, trade routes and credit. It premiered on November 25, 2025, ran 40 episodes, and is finished.
Writer-director Zhang Ting (张挺) has described the book's approach as a real historical frame around a fictional central figure, comparing the hero to Wei Xiaobao in Jin Yong's The Deer and the Cauldron. In his words, this is not ancient history but modern people seeing the world through ancient eyes, and the theme is "winning back oneself". The production scouted nine cities and shot in five provinces and municipalities over nearly 150 days, and the art department spent three to four months building a Pingyao street.
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Gu Pingyuan (古平原, played by Chen Xiao, 陈晓) comes from a small merchant family but wants an official career. At the imperial examinations he is framed, jailed, and sent into exile at Ningguta (宁古塔) in the far northeast. On the road he meets the Shanxi merchant Fourth Master Chang (常四爷, Cheng Taishen, 成泰燊) and his daughter Chang Yu'er (常玉儿, Sun Qian, 孙千), and that meeting turns him toward trade.
From there he builds a career in stages. He starts in a piaohao (票号, "draft bank", the Shanxi-style remittance houses), makes his name in tea, and later takes on salt. Along the way he works with, and against, the regional merchant groups of Huizhou, Shanxi, Beijing and Zhejiang, and deals with foreign firms including the East India Company. He is also trying to learn who set him up. The series cuts between cold north, grey Shanxi, green tea country and the capital, with a different look for each stage.
The drama is set in the late Qing dynasty (晚清). The Taiping Rebellion and the Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧) both appear. It is adapted from the novel of the same name by Zhao Zhiyu (赵之羽) and was produced by CCTV, iQIYI and Haitangguo Pictures (海棠果影业), with filming from April to August 2024, mostly at Hengdian.
Beijing News reported that on opening day CCTV-8's audience rating passed 3 within 27 minutes, peaking at 3.2151%, the fastest CCTV-8 drama to pass 3 on its first day in three years. On iQIYI the heat value passed 7,500 by 8 p.m. the next day.
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