The Old Story of Yu Hong

A string of deaths hits a town in Northeast China in the 1990s: a drunk frozen into an ice sculpture, a strongman whose limbs are severed, a local bully who vanishes. They happen around Yuhong Square and trace back to a forestry-farm case from years earlier. The series opens on that case, with a young railway line inspector, Liu Yang, left for dead in a forest fire.

The police side belongs to Liu Juan, a local policewoman who works cases by chatting with neighbours and who is suddenly looking after her ex-husband's four-year-old daughter, a child who speaks only Cantonese. The third thread is Chen Hong, who has spent years under her husband's violence and begins to plan his death. The three lines run separately at first and meet at the square.

The town is called Tiecheng ("Iron City"), a declining industrial town. The time is the end of the 1990s, when state-owned enterprises were being restructured and workers laid off, a process Chinese writers call xiagang ("stepping off the post").

The source is "Yu Hong", which Ban Yu first published in the journal Mangzhong in 2019 and collected in his 2022 book Huan Bu ("slow steps"). Yuhong is a district of Shenyang, the Liaoning capital, and the story's square carries the same name.

The murders are the way in; the town is what the series is about. The trade outlet GuDuo describes the structure as a run of character portraits, each person introduced with a story of their own and all gathered at Yuhong Square. That is also why the pace reads as slow for the genre: much of the running time goes to daily life, feelings and past events.

English Wikipedia counts Ban Yu as one of the "Three Masters of the Northeast Literary Revival". The landmark adaptation is The Long Season, a 12-episode series from 2023, and both Yangtze Evening News and The Paper's column compare this series to it. The column argues that The Long Season rested on one big question, who did it, and this series gives that hook less weight.

The format is the other debate. GuDuo says the series was originally planned as a 12-episode drama of about 45 minutes an episode, then re-cut into 34 shorter episodes. Its phrase for the result is "half long, half short". We found no statement from iQIYI.