General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

Horror Stories of Tang Dynasty (唐朝诡事录)

Horror Stories of Tang Dynasty (唐朝诡事录, also rendered Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty) is a Chinese costume suspense unit-case detective web series produced by iQiyi and Changxin Media, supervised by Guo Jingyu, with Wei Fenghua as original author and screenwriter, Bai Shan as chief director, and Yang Xuwen and Yang Zhigang in the leading roles.¹ The first season premiered on iQiyi on September 27, 2022.¹ The series adapts material from Tang dynasty zhiguai (records of the strange) notebooks, chiefly Duan Chengshi's Youyang Zazu (酉阳杂俎), into detective cases, and it has grown into a multi-season franchise with a spin-off mid-length drama, musicals, and immersive performances.²

Key fact	Detail
First season	36 episodes, eight case units, premiered September 27, 2022 on iQiyi¹^•³
Main characters	Lu Lingfeng (卢凌风), a Golden Guard (金吾卫) colonel played by Yang Xuwen, and Su Wuming (苏无名), a close disciple of Di Renjie played by Yang Zhigang¹^•⁴
Source material	Wei Fenghua's 2013 novel of the same name, built around Duan Chengshi's Tang zhiguai collection Youyang Zazu²
Season 2	Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty II: To the West (唐朝诡事录之西行), 40 episodes, aired from July 18, 2024; Douban score opened at 8.1 and rose to 8.4⁵^•³
Season 3	Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty III: To Chang'an (唐朝诡事录之长安), 40 episodes, premiered November 8, 2025; Douban opening score 8.1 and more than 4 million pre-broadcast reservations⁶^•⁷^•³
Franchise scale	Three seasons with cumulative views above 20 billion, per the Beijing Municipal Radio and Television Bureau⁸
International recognition	To the West won Best Series at the 2025 Asian Academy Creative Awards in Singapore, ending Netflix's three-year hold on the award⁹

Spoilers

Premise and narrative structure

The series is set in the early Tang, during the power struggle between Li Longji and Princess Taiping, and follows the detective team of Lu Lingfeng and Su Wuming as they solve strange cases that protect the people and the state.⁴ Screenwriter Wei Fenghua chose the eight years from the Tanglong era to the Kaiyuan prosperity as the setting because coups and turbulence in that period naturally suit suspense plotting, and the team fixed a worldview that "all zhiguai is reality, and all reality is legend," which turns the fragmentary records of old books into dramatically coherent unit cases.⁸

The first season consists of eight stylistically distinct cases: Chang'an Red Tea (长安红茶), The Stone Bridge Painting (石桥图), Zhongsheng Hall (众生堂), Yellow Plum Kill (黄梅杀), The Strange Tale of Gantang Station (甘棠驿怪谈), The Crocodile God (鼍神), Human-Faced Flower (人面花), and Cantian Tower (参天楼), each running about four episodes.⁴^•¹² Director Bai Shan explained that the cases were deliberately designed as independent units rather than hung on a single overarching case, each with its own complete beginning, development, climax, and ending, while transitions such as Su Wuming's transfer out of the capital keep the whole coherent; the eight cases together trace Lu Lingfeng's growth from arrogance to steadiness.¹³ The second season kept the unit form but linked the cases along a westward road narrative toward Dunhuang, and the third returns the team to Chang'an, where cases including the golden peaches of Kang, the crying of Chengfo Temple, and a polo match case unfold against the contest between the emperor and the Grand Princess.¹⁴^•¹⁵

Critics have identified the series' distinctive method as fusing the "gui" (strange) of zhiguai fiction with detective plotting: each case's supernatural surface, whether a monster or an evil spirit, is always revealed to be human wrongdoing, and the cases pull Tang folk customs, court secrets, and social conditions into view behind the mystery.¹⁶^•¹² Huang Zhongjun, a professor at the Academy of Arts of Zhejiang Normal University and a member of the China Literature and Art Critics Association, describes the series as combining Japanese "henkaku" (irregular) reasoning with the Chinese Tang chuanqi and zhiguai tradition, using information gaps and unreliable narration to form what he calls a "strange realism" narrative paradigm rather than the Western locked-room logic puzzle.⁹

Origin and adaptation

The story comes from Wei Fenghua's 2013 novel of the same name, which uses the Youyang Zazu by the Tang dynasty zhiguai writer Duan Chengshi as its thread to collect strange tales and curiosities left by Tang people.² Wei, who has studied Tang history for many years, has described the book as an interpretation of Tang zhiguai notebooks rather than a novel with complete characters and plot; the drama is therefore substantially an original screenplay built on fragments of the old records.¹⁰ Of the eight cases in the first season, six can be traced to clues or prototypes in the novel, but the prototypes are often only a few sentences; the "Human-Faced Flower" (人面花) case rests on a passage of little more than thirty characters, while "Cantian Tower" (参天楼) and "Zhongsheng Hall" (众生堂) have no direct source, though the illusion contests and mechanical birds in the former draw on Tang notebooks.²

The project was first prepared in early 2020 as four independent web films, Tuoshen (鼍神), Gantangyi Guaitan (甘棠驿怪谈), Renmianhua (人面花), and Diyubian (地狱变), each with its own strange-case plot. After repeated discussion, iQiyi and Changxin Media decided instead to shoot a unit-case detective web drama.¹¹

Production

Filming ran from October 2020 to May 2021, about seven months, which director Bai Shan called a thorough breakthrough in scheduling, art design, and post-production; he emphasized building the feeling of "gui" through costume, makeup, props, cinematography, and sound rather than through literal ghosts.¹ Bai Shan has given the total creation cycle as 213 days, including a one-month pre-production period devoted to aligning every department on the script's tone before shooting began.¹³ Because the protagonists and main line were concentrated, the team used a single crew shooting in unit order rather than a second unit.¹⁷ The final Cantian Tower case required a 5,000-square-meter studio for the illusion fair, about 45 days of set construction, and extensive computer-generated imagery for the 33-story tower itself.¹³

The production drew on historical material: the Beijing Municipal Radio and Television Bureau has noted that the crew converted clothing, government offices, and ward structure from Tang sources into living material, and the screenwriter wove real artifacts and poems, such as Li Bai's "Chang Xiang Si" in the third season, into the plots.⁸ For the second season's "Yunding Zui" unit, Wei adapted a story from the Tang notebook Duyi Zhi about a man lured into an estate, soaked in wine, and sold as a slave.¹⁸

Reception and franchise

The first season was described by its supervisor Guo Jingyu as a "three-nothing" drama, with no major IP, no traffic stars, and no large-scale marketing, yet it became a word-of-mouth hit of 2022, with its iQiyi heat value passing 8,888 on October 13 during its run.¹⁹^•¹² People's Daily Online praised the way the eight cases, from court to countryside, present Tang society in full, while noting flaws in pacing and reasoning.⁴ Douban scores for the season were reported as 7.6 at its finale and 8.0 in later retrospective coverage.¹²^•⁹ The season was later broadcast on Dragon TV from November 16, 2023.²⁰

The second season, To the West, broke the usual sequel decline: it opened on Douban at 8.1 and rose to 8.4, exceeded the first season in both heat and reputation, reached a peak iQiyi heat value of 10,205, and topped the weekly drama broadcast index in late July 2024.⁵^•²¹^•²² The unit The Death of the Coroner (仵作之死) was singled out by fans for particular praise.⁹ The third season, To Chang'an, directed by Ju Xingmao with Guo Jingyu and Bai Shan as supervisors and also broadcast on Beijing TV, premiered on November 8, 2025 with more than 4 million reservations, a Douban opening of 8.1, and the leading position in daily effective viewership among new long-form dramas; it was later nominated for Best Chinese Television Series at the 31st Shanghai TV Festival's Magnolia Awards.²³^•⁶^•²⁴ Across the three seasons the series accumulated more than 20 billion views.⁸

Franchise expansion. Changxin Media began building a "Tang gui" IP universe even before the first season aired, planning short dramas, mid-length and long-form series, and musicals set in the same world.² The franchise's fourth work is the 21-episode mid-length drama Strange Chronicles of Tang (唐诡奇谭), which premiered on iQiyi on December 17, 2025 with the story arcs "The Worry-Relieving Shop" (解忧店) and "Song of the Palace of Misfortune" (眚宫歌).⁹^•²⁵ A further mid-length work, Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty: To the South Sea (唐朝诡事录之南海), was shot together with the third season at about a quarter of its length, and a future installment, To the Shu Road (唐朝诡事录之蜀道), has been announced.²⁶^•²⁷ At the 2025 Asian Academy Creative Awards ceremony in Singapore in December 2025, To the West won the Best Series award over the Korean hit When Life Gives You Tangerines, breaking Netflix's three-year hold on the category.⁹

Adaptation approach

Scholarly work on the series describes a consistent conversion mechanism from Tang strange-tale records to television. One study of the franchise characterizes it as "zhiguai on the surface, the human heart underneath": documentary research precedes writing, the grammar of the suspense genre recodes zhiguai motifs, and nested narrative structures balance cognitive tension with rational explanation, so that supernatural symbols carry observations on power, desire, and identity.²⁸ Another study of the series' cross-media narration argues that it shifts Tang chuanqi's emphasis from displaying marvels to driving puzzle-solving, combines unit-drama and mainline structures, and converts literary imagery into audiovisual spectacle, moving the mode of reception from literati contemplation to mass immersive viewing.²⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026