Before the costume drama Against the Current (兰香如故) could dress a single character, its crew built the world those characters live in. The production occupied about 40 mu (roughly 25,000 square meters) in Hengdian (横店) and spent 155 days raising a Ming-dynasty official residence at 1:1 scale, with the core set Zhichun Guan (知春馆) finished in May 2025 after four rounds of blueprints and study trips to classical gardens in Suzhou and Nanjing. Every wall and step carries period hierarchy: the main courtyard of the Lin mansion sits three steps above the side courtyards, and the threshold of the firewood room is half a cun lower, small differences that translate Ming sumptuary rank into architecture and give the story’s class pressure a physical form.
The series premieres September 11 at 21:30 on CCTV-8’s second prime-time slot with a simultaneous Tencent Video release (earlier publicity had pointed to a September 10 Tencent debut). It adapts He Yanshan’s (禾晏山) novel Lan Xiang Yuan (兰香缘), with Tong Hua (桐华) as head screenwriter and Tan Songyun (谭松韵) and Liu Xueyi (刘学义) in the leads, joined by Li Meng (李梦), Zheng Hehuizi (郑合惠子), Guo Keyu (郭柯宇) and Niu Junfeng (牛骏峰). The main run was cut from the originally registered 40 episodes to 31; a second 16-episode part, Xiangqi Changchuan (香气长传), has its premiere date still to be announced. Tencent reservations have passed three million.
Costume work supplies the show’s most discussed craft layer. The wardrobe department called in intangible-heritage masters, and Su embroidery and Kesi silk tapestry (缂丝) appear across the main costumes, the heroine’s skirt-hem bands follow motifs found in Ming dynasty paintings of court ladies in the Palace Museum collection, and the dress code for ceremonies and banquets was checked against the Collected Statutes of the Ming Dynasty (大明会典). Colors track the heroine’s rank and inner state through the story, shifting from the light hemp tone of a servant’s dress to deep indigo, then ink green, and finally the cardinal red of a household’s matriarch. Tan Songyun wears more than 30 handmade outfits as Xu Lanxiang, the most expensive of which took three months to embroider, and her costume color changes seven times across that arc. Plant dyes and reproduction patterns, the makers say, let the clothing “tell the story” on its own.
Beyond the wardrobe, the garden carries part of the narrative. Its name comes from a line about plants gradually sensing spring as sprouts break everywhere, and the design treats the residence as a witness to nearly sixty years of Xu Lanxiang’s life, with the greenery rising and fading alongside her. The story opens with Shen Jialan (沈嘉兰), the eldest granddaughter of a grand secretary’s household, whose family is framed for treason and destroyed; to save her, family servants substitute her with the identity of their just-deceased daughter, Xu Lanxiang, and she enters the household of her former fiance, Lin Jinqi (林锦岐), as the lowest-ranked of its maids. She climbs without shortcuts, using the literacy, accounting, incense-making, dyeing and business sense she learned in her grandfather’s house, and forms an alliance with the household’s other oppressed maids before clearing her family’s name. Tan Songyun plays the role from age 16 to the matriarch years, a span of about sixty years; the old-age makeup takes six hours to apply, and crew members recall actors tearing up when they met the character’s aged face. One scene required her to act a winter chill while filming in 40-degree heat.
Behind the camera the creative team is almost entirely female, a setup the production has described as an example of women supporting women. Tong Hua, known for dramas built around women’s choices under dynastic pressure, wrote the screenplay with Xiao Lou (箫楼); the directors are Huang Yingxiang (黄颖湘) and Chen Dan (陈丹). The shoot used natural light and avoided heavy smoothing filters, aiming for a gongbi-painting texture, and ran from May 7 to October 10, 2025. The female ensemble gives the supporting cast their own arcs: Zheng Hehuizi’s Du Cuique (杜翠雀) turns from a gentle, obedient girl into a ruthless one after repeated blows, while Li Meng’s Zhao Xingtang (赵星棠) is an outspoken noblewoman whose rivalry with the heroine softens into understanding.
The bar for the slot is high. One period drama that premiered on CCTV-8’s second prime-time slot in December 2025 reached 520 million viewers with an average CVB rating of 1.13 percent and a single-episode peak of 1.29 percent, taking the year’s title among costume dramas in that slot; local media have framed that record as the baseline Against the Current must clear if it is to become the season’s dark horse.
