Pursuit of Jade

On a snowy night, the newly orphaned Fan Changyu (樊长玉), played by Tian Xiwei (田曦薇), finds Xie Zheng (谢征), played by Zhang Linghe (张凌赫), badly injured. She works as a butcher to keep her family fed, and she nurses him. He is the Marquis of Wu'an (武安侯), a decorated general, and he hides that identity while he pursues revenge for a blood feud that began sixteen years earlier.

Her reason for the marriage is practical: she enters a ruzhui (入赘) union, a matrilocal marriage in which the husband joins the wife's household, to save her family's house. In the village he passes for her frail live-in husband and uses the gentle look to mislead the neighbours, while quietly investigating the destruction of his family. Then war arrives, and Fan Changyu goes onto the battlefield.

The drama is directed by Zeng Qingjie (曾庆杰) from the web novel Zhu Yu (逐玉) by Tuan Zi Lai Xi (团子来袭).

Fan Changyu is written as feisty and resilient, and on screen that means labour: she butchers, supports a household and takes the marriage on her own terms. A review on the Philippine site The Diarist called her "a fresh take on the stereotype" of an ugly, ill-tempered butcher.

A second layer pulls the other way. Online viewers nicknamed Xie Zheng fendiye jiangjun (粉底液将军, "the foundation-liquid general") because his face and hair stay unmarked after battle. A Lianhe Zaobao column noted that the styling and scene design keep him looking well, and that the genre's own term for the formula is gu'ou (古偶, "costume idol drama").

Sixth Tone, on March 30, found some viewers praising the aesthetic appeal and strong female protagonist, and others criticising it for putting visual beauty ahead of narrative coherence. Douban (豆瓣) scored it 6.6 at that moment.