To the Wonder

Li Wenxiu (李文秀, played by Zhou Yiran, 周依然) grew up in Altay, a Han Chinese girl who dreams of becoming a writer. When her attempt at city life runs into setbacks, she goes back to her mother, Zhang Fengxia (张凤侠, Ma Yili, 马伊琍), who runs a small shop far from any neighbour and also looks after her own mother-in-law, who has dementia.

Summer takes the family up to the pastures, where Wenxiu meets Batay (巴太, Yu Shi, 于適), a young Kazakh herder who comes home each season to help his father with the animals. From there the series follows the people around them: herding families, a village head, a border guard on the summer pasture, and the women whose domestic lives the screenwriters expanded from the original essays.

The setting is Altay (阿勒泰), a prefecture in the far north of Xinjiang where Han and Kazakh communities live side by side, with summer pastures, river valleys and red gravel desert among the locations.

The series is adapted from the essay collection of the same name by Li Juan (李娟). Director Teng Congcong (滕丛丛), who also directed the film Send Me to the Clouds (送我上青云), wrote the script with Peng Yining (彭奕宁). According to Chuanguan News, the screenwriters added several characters and romances to link the essays into one story.

In 2024 it was selected for the main long-form competition at the Canneseries festival in France, the first Chinese-language series in that section, according to the same review.

The show also moved travellers. Workers' Daily, republished by China News, reported that after it aired, searches for Altay on one travel platform were up 562% year on year, and that the area received 886,500 visitor trips over the May Day holiday, up 43.4%, according to the local culture and tourism authority.