The Litchi Road

It is the Tianbao era of the Tang dynasty. Li Shande (李善德, Lei Jiayin), a junior official at the Shanglin Garden Bureau in Chang'an (长安), is tricked by colleagues into the post of "lychee envoy." He must deliver fresh lychees from Lingnan (岭南), more than 5,000 li (里, about 2,500 km) away, for an imperial consort's birthday. The saying goes that a lychee changes color in a day, loses its scent in two and its taste in three.

The series adds a second line that the book does not have. Zheng Ping'an (郑平安, Yue Yunpeng), Li Shande's brother-in-law, is sent to Lingnan to collect evidence against a corrupt chancellor, and the two end up in the same region among local power-holders such as the governor He Youguang (何有光).

The Tianbao era (742-756) is mid-eighth-century Tang, at the height of the dynasty. The consort is Yang Guifei (杨贵妃). The series draws on the line of Tang poet Du Mu (杜牧) that any Chinese reader knows: "a rider raises red dust, the consort smiles, and no one knows it is lychees coming."

The source is Ma Boyong's novella of about 70,000 characters, serialized in the magazine Harvest (收获) in spring 2021 and published as a book in 2022. Chinese Wikipedia records a Douban rating of 8.5 from more than 100,000 raters, and a third-place finish on Douban's 2022 list of Chinese fiction. Because the book is short, critics said the television version was padded; Ma Boyong replied that the TV format let the characters' stories unfold more slowly and made up for regrets he had about the novel. A film version starring Da Peng (大鹏) was released in July 2025 and is separate.