General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

New Life Begins (卿卿日常)

New Life Begins (卿卿日常) is a 2022 Chinese costume light-comedy romance television series directed by Zhao Qichen (赵启辰) and starring Bai Jingting (白敬亭) and Tian Xiwei (田曦薇), adapted from the web novel Qing Chuan Ri Chang (清穿日常) by Duo Mu Mu Duo (多木木多). It ran for 40 episodes on iQiyi from November 10 to December 9, 2022, and became the fastest series in the platform's history to reach a popularity index of 10,000, doing so within 144 hours of release.¹^•²^•³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Native and English titles	卿卿日常 / New Life Begins¹
Source material	Web novel Qing Chuan Ri Chang (清穿日常) by Duo Mu Mu Duo³
Broadcast	40 episodes, iQiyi, November 10 to December 9, 2022¹
Leads	Bai Jingting as Yin Zheng, Sixth Young Master of Xinchuan; Tian Xiwei as Li Wei²
Heat record	iQiyi popularity index broke 10,000 within 144 hours, the fastest in platform history, breaking the 2021 record of My Heroic Husband; peak value 10,477⁴^•⁵
Douban rating	7.2 out of 10, from more than 470,000 users⁶
Setting	Fictional world of Nine Rivers (九川), where each region sends women annually to marry the young masters of the ruling Xinchuan³
International release	Streamed in North America, Europe, Australia, India, Singapore, and Malaysia from November 2022, later in Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Cambodia, and Japan⁷

Spoilers

Premise and setting

The story takes place in a fictional world divided into Nine Rivers (九川). After years of war, Xinchuan (新川) prevailed and established a hundred-year peace alliance, under which the other regions must each year select women of marriageable age to wed Xinchuan's young masters.³ The regions differ in customs and in the status of women: Li Wei's home region of Jichuan (霁川) practices monogamy, Xinchuan practices polygamy with strict distinctions between legitimate and concubine-born children and male precedence over female, while in Danchuan (丹川) women head the household and husbands marry in.³

Li Wei, who hopes to fail the selection and return home to a comfortable life, is instead matched with Yin Zheng (尹峥), the low-profile Sixth Young Master of Xinchuan, and the two begin a "marriage before love" relationship.³^•² Yin Zheng, a son of a concubine who keeps a low profile to avoid his brothers' bullying, proposes the marriage himself, both to spare his father a difficult decision and to avoid drawing attention.⁸ Early on, Li Wei believes her husband is dying and plans how to live as a well-provided widow back home; the leads declare their feelings within about ten episodes, and the series follows their daily life, meals, and the extended family of young masters and their wives.⁸^•²

From novel to screen

The source novel is a "Qing time-travel" (清穿) story, a popular web-fiction genre in which a modern person returns to the Qing dynasty: its heroine crosses over to the Qing court, falls in love with a prince, and rises from favored consort to empress.³ The novel's own description is "Li Wei's happy life in the Qing dynasty," and its author stated the intent as "living well at any time."⁹ In the novel, Li Wei knows her husband is the future Yongzheng Emperor, accommodates him from the start, wins the household struggles against a power-hungry principal wife, and bears five sons and a daughter.⁹ Some readers read the novel as a chilling portrait of a modern woman whose contemporary consciousness is worn away as she adapts to palace life.³

The adaptation made large changes to these foundations. It removed the time-travel premise, the Qing court setting, and the succession and harem-conflict plots, blurred the historical period, and replaced them with the invented Nine Rivers world, keeping the character framework and the focus on everyday life.³^•¹⁰^•¹¹ The rights to the novel had been purchased years before the drama was made.¹⁰ The production centered the series on the "daily" (日常) of its title, building the plot around food, household management, and family banter rather than palace scheming.¹²

Cast and production

Bai Jingting plays Yin Zheng and Tian Xiwei plays Li Wei; the supporting cast includes Chen Xiaoyun (陳小紜) as Hao Jia, Liu Guanlin (劉冠麟) as Yin An, Liu Lingzi (劉令姿) as Yuan Ying, Zhang Xiaochen (張曉晨) as Yin Song, Chang Long (昌隆) as Yin Qi, Liu Meihan (劉美含) as Song Wu, and Fan Shuaiqi (范帥琦) as Shangguan Jing.¹³ The screenwriting team included Ji Sangrou (紀桑柔) and Ding Lu (丁璐), both credited on My Heroic Husband, and the series was made by iQiyi with New Classics Media.¹³^•¹ It came from the same production team as the 2021 costume comedy My Heroic Husband, with Liu Wenyang (刘闻洋) as chief producer.³^•¹⁴

The art direction took Song dynasty aesthetics as its design basis, and the dishes shown on screen were initially modeled mainly on Song-style cuisine; the theme song "Qinghui" (清晖) was sung by Liu Yuning.¹⁵ The cast was announced in September 2022, and the premiere date was set on November 8, two days before launch.¹⁵

Viewership and reception

The series was iQiyi's fastest drama to break the 10,000 popularity-index mark, doing so within 144 hours of launch and peaking at 10,477, with 16 days above 10,000 and more than 3,755 trending topics across Chinese social platforms.⁴ On November 20, 2022, it held first place on the Cloud Data (云合) continuous-drama heat ranking with a 36.1% share of effective plays, more than 20 percentage points ahead of the second-place series.³ According to the data platforms Enlightent, Kuyun, Maoyan, and Dengta, it ranked first in popularity index and video views for the year, and it was Maoyan's 2022 comedy champion.⁵^•⁴ It was also named one of Weibo's ten most popular dramas of 2022.¹⁶

Viewers widely adopted the label "electronic pickled vegetable" (电子榨菜), meaning a show pleasant to watch alongside a meal, and critics noted its brisk pacing, playful score, and polished costumes and cinematography.³ On Douban it holds 7.2 out of 10 from over 470,000 raters; some viewers found it light and easy to watch, while others judged the plot simple and the later episodes slower, which kept the score below 8.⁶ A newspaper commentary concluded that for all its popularity it remained, in the end, "electronic pickled vegetable."¹²

Themes and critical debate

The series is frequently discussed as part of a 2022 wave, alongside A Dream of Splendor (梦华录), that replaced harem-style "female competition" (雌竞) plots with women helping one another: wives and concubines in the same household become friends and allies rather than rivals, and the women of the Nine Rivers pool money for a flood-stricken friend and help each other establish independent lives.¹⁷^•¹² Lines in which Li Wei rejects rescue-by-hero plots and calls arranged marriage a forced transaction that ignores the other person's will were read as commentary on contemporary gender debates.¹⁷^•³

The same combination drew criticism. Commentators asked whether the independence preached by characters inside a polygamous, patriarchal setting is genuine, and argued that the show's feminism stays at the level of slogans while crises are still resolved by male power; at its finale, some critics called the overly dreamlike ending "electronic anesthesia."³^•¹⁷ A commentary carried on the People's Weekly website described its treatment of feminist topics as surface-level, designed to flatter the audience rather than examine women's circumstances.¹⁸ Readers of the original novel objected that the adaptation had softened the source's tragic core, in which a woman's only route to survival in the old society was self-anaesthetizing acceptance of her situation.⁸ Another commentary argued that the drama is thoroughly "anti-female-competition" in its household relationships, while questioning whether depicting mutual aid alone addresses the roots of female rivalry.¹⁹ In this debate, Xu Man (许曼), an associate professor of history at Tufts University, cautioned against judging centuries-old gender norms solely from a 21st-century standpoint, since such readings omit their historical context.⁹ Academic commentary has made similar points: a 2023 thesis notes scholars who credit the series' "anti-female-competition" narrative with breaking the palace-intrigue mold while criticizing its idealized relationships for glossing over structural oppression.²⁰

International release

From November 2022 the series streamed on platforms in North America, Europe, Australia, India, Singapore, and Malaysia, with releases planned for Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Cambodia, and Japan.⁷ It reached Thailand's TrueID from November 24, 2022, and South Korea's CHANNEL CHINA platform from January 16, 2023.²¹ It is listed on Netflix in multiple territories²² and was distributed in Singapore by Viu in 2022.²³ It began Japanese television broadcast on BS TV Tokyo on January 20, 2025, under the title 卿卿日常～宮廷を彩る幸せレシピ～.¹⁶ iQiyi's 2022 annual results announcement cited the series as a headline drama of the second half of the year.⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › International serial drama and telenovelas › East Asian drama series › East Asian web and streaming serials › Titles My to So

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 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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