General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Song of Youth (玉楼春)

Song of Youth (玉楼春) is a 2021 Chinese costume light comedy television series produced by Huanyu Entertainment with Youku, written and produced by Yu Zheng (于正), and starring Bai Lu and Wang Yizhe as lovers from different social stations in a Ming dynasty setting¹. It premiered on Youku on July 26, 2021, and ran for 43 episodes². The title comes from the name of a classical Chinese ci-poetry (classical Chinese lyric poetry written to tune patterns) tune pattern³.

Key fact	Detail
Original title	玉楼春; English title Song of Youth; Japanese broadcast title 玉楼春～君に詠むロマンス～⁴
Production	Huanyu Entertainment with Youku; written and produced by Yu Zheng; directed by Gao Han and Bai Yunmo¹
Cast	Bai Lu (Lin Shaochun), Wang Yizhe (Sun Yulou), Jin Chen, Lamu Yangzi, Yang Rong, Qiao Xin, Xuan Lu, and others²
Episodes and premiere	43 episodes; premiered on Youku July 26, 2021²
Setting	Ming dynasty, Longqing era, with an otherwise unspecified historical background⁵
Filming	Began April 17, 2020 at Hengdian; wrapped August 14, 2020 after 120 days¹
Reception	Douban rating of 4.7, against 7.0 for You Are My Glory and 8.1 for The Bond in the same season⁶

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in the Longqing era of the Ming dynasty. Lin Shaochun, the daughter of an official, loses her family when her father is framed for corruption. To survive and to hide her identity while seeking to clear his name, she joins a theatrical troupe and masters music, chess, calligraphy, and painting⁵. There she meets Sun Yulou, the fourth son of the powerful Sun family headed by the chief grand secretary Sun Xun, who falls in love with her at first sight⁵.

She attempts to sit the imperial examinations disguised as a man to seek justice for her father, but the plan fails when the examination hall requires a physical inspection; Yulou secretly helps her and her father's name is cleared². When the Sun family learns her background they try to block the match, but after Shaochun rescues the family from financial trouble she marries in during the family's decline²^•⁴. Inside the household she manages relations between mother-in-law and daughters-in-law, and outside she resolves a series of crises⁵.

The central turn comes when Shaochun discovers that the man behind her father's wrongful conviction is her own father-in-law, Sun Xun, and she ultimately chooses justice over family ties². In the finale, Sun Xun is granted poisoned wine by the emperor; the Sun sons escape punishment but the family falls. Yulou leaves Shaochun a letter asking her to forget him, and the two are reunited years later at a shadow-puppet stall⁷.

Production

Yu Zheng spent a year writing the script and said the series grew out of his long engagement with lectures on Dream of the Red Chamber by the scholar Jiang Xun, which is why the drama shares many features with that classical novel¹. Filming ran 120 days at Hengdian from April 17 to August 14, 2020¹. Bai Lu prepared for two weeks before shooting, learning the pipa, opera, and etiquette; her most difficult scene was an underwater shot that took an entire afternoon to film⁵^•¹.

Design and traditional crafts

Costume and set design was the series' most praised aspect. Although the plot corresponds to no specific dynasty, the story's reference period is the Ming dynasty, and all styling, including nearly 2,000 costumes, was designed to that period⁸. Hand-embroidered "hundred children" motifs and cloud shoulders, both Ming features, appear on screen, and the costumes use intangible-cultural-heritage techniques including Gu embroidery (a half-embroidery, half-painting technique from the Jiajing era), chanhua silk-wrapped flowers,洒线绣 ground-laid embroidery, wool embroidery, and gold filigree⁸. The production also reproduced examination customs in detail, from the examination hall to the entry tickets candidates carried⁸.

Art director Luan Hexin described the visual style as warm: interior scenes use warm colors, the Sun family garden draws on blue-green landscape painting, and the architecture references Tang, Song, and Ming styles with cold tones removed⁹. The series continued the low-saturation "Morandi color" palette Yu Zheng had used since Story of Yanxi Palace, with shadow puppetry as a recurring prop¹⁰.

Reception and criticism

The series opened with heavy promotion. Yu Zheng, for whom it was the first work after his public 2020 apology for plagiarism, said before release that if it performed poorly he would leave the industry⁶. Its Douban score settled at 4.7, the lowest among the season's major dramas, even though its social media reach was large: the Douyin topic had 3.56 billion plays and the Weibo topic 1.96 billion reads¹¹.

Critics concentrated on the writing rather than the visuals. Wenhui Daily argued that the refined "surface" could not compensate for the absence of a strong story, and noted that the Sun household's favored imperial daughter, scheming daughter-in-law, and philandering son map closely onto Dream of the Red Chamber characters such as Jia Baoyu, Yuanchun, and Wang Xifeng³. The Beijing Daily reviewer found that the heroine's near-perfect abilities, from outperforming the capital's finest pipa player to entering the imperial selection of consorts despite her background, strain plausibility, and that the hero's love at first sight has no stated cause⁸. Other critics called the show a patchwork of borrowed plots, citing the opening servant-swap scene resembling The Orphan of Zhao and the cross-dressing examination plot resembling Zaisheng Yuan¹. The supporting couples were received better than the leads: Lamu Yangzi's eldest daughter-in-law, a general's daughter, and Jin Chen's capable third daughter-in-law drew the warmest audience response¹⁰.

Costume controversy

Shortly after the premiere, comments appeared on overseas forums claiming the series' costumes were Korean hanbok. Bai Lu posted on Weibo the day after the premiere under the tag "玉楼春韩网评论" with the reply "This is Chinese!", and Wang Yizhe did the same⁵^•¹². Chinese netizens soon questioned the comments' authenticity, noting their machine-translation phrasing and long-dormant Turkish and Indian accounts, and suspected a staged publicity stunt¹². Art director Luan Hexin responded that China, Japan, and Korea share a continuous East Asian aesthetic tradition⁵.

Distribution

Alibaba and Youku, which held the series' information-network distribution rights, obtained a pre-litigation preservation order against Bilibili requiring the platform to delete unauthorized clips and filter further uploads¹³. The series later aired in Japan as 玉楼春～君に詠むロマンス～ on Sun TV, weekdays at 15:04⁴, and a Cantonese-dubbed version ran on Canada's Fairchild TV in 2023¹⁴.

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026