General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20268 min read

Soul Ferry (灵魂摆渡)

Soul Ferry (灵魂摆渡, also translated Soul Ferryman; also known as 见鬼之灵魂摆渡) is a Chinese supernatural web series that premiered on the streaming platform iQIYI on February 28, 2014. It follows Xia Dongqing, a young man with yin-yang eyes who can see ghosts, and Zhao Li, a soul ferryman who guides spirits lingering in the human world to the underworld, as they help stranded souls resolve their unfinished business. Directed by Ju Xingmao and Guo Shimin and written by Xiao Jixiangtian, the 20-episode first season became one of the defining works of China's early web-drama era and spawned a franchise spanning three seasons, network films, a stage musical, a Singapore-set spin-off, and, in 2026, a revival series and a series of fully AI-generated films.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
First season premiere	February 28, 2014, on iQIYI; 20 episodes of about 40 minutes¹
Creators	Directed by Ju Xingmao and Guo Shimin; written by Xiao Jixiangtian; Guo Jingyu as supervisor¹^•³
Main cast	Yu Yi as Zhao Li, Liu Zhiyang as Xia Dongqing, Xiao Yin as Wang Xiaoya¹
Season 1 performance	Over 120 million views in the first week and over 500 million in total; Douban rating 8.7 from more than 112,000 users³^•¹
Franchise scale	Three web-drama seasons (2014–2016), the network film Soul Ferry: Yellow Springs (2018), the spin-off Nanyang Legends, and a stage musical; total series plays near 4.5 billion⁴^•⁵
2026 revival	Soul Ferry: 10th Anniversary, 24 episodes of 15–20 minutes, premiered June 2, 2026, with the original lead cast⁶
AIGC films	The "Fushengmeng" series of AI-generated films, beginning with Butterfly Dream and Dream of the Heavenly Maiden on August 22, 2026⁷

Spoilers

Premise and style

The story centers on a trio that fans call the "iron triangle": Xia Dongqing (Liu Zhiyang), an orphan raised in a welfare home who works the night shift at Convenience Store No. 444; Zhao Li (Yu Yi), a self-described "civil servant of the underworld" who is in fact a soul ferryman escorting lingering souls to the afterlife; and Wang Xiaoya (Xiao Yin), a forthright university student whose true identity is Jiutian Xuannü, the Heavenly Maiden of the Nine Heavens, associated with Kunlun.¹⁹ After midnight, the store becomes a junction between the worlds of the living and the dead, and the three become involved in one supernatural incident after another.⁸

The series is unusual among Chinese productions in treating ghosts, the underworld, and ferrymen as genuinely real rather than leaving a scientific escape hatch at the end of each case. Critics place it in the Chinese literary tradition of "telling human affairs through ghost stories," comparing it to a web-drama version of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (聊斋志异). Each unit story turns on a soul that cannot leave the world because of an unresolved obsession, and the episodes are organized around the human drives of greed, anger, and delusion, mapping onto Buddhist themes of parting from loved ones and unattainable desires.⁸

The original series (2014–2016)

The first season was an early product of iQIYI's self-produced content push, with Guo Jingyu as supervisor, and it broke the low-cost, small-production pattern of earlier Chinese web dramas. Within a week of release its play count passed 120 million, with more than ten million viewers, and its total plays exceeded 500 million. In September 2014 it won the Zixun Award for "China's Best Web Self-produced Drama," chosen from more than 40 competing works.²^•³

Seasons two and three. A second season followed in 2015 and a third in 2016, with the third season billed as the concluding one and released on November 4, 2016. At that point Guo Jingyu announced a feature-film adaptation, expected for 2017. The three seasons together accumulated nearly five billion clicks, and the first season's Douban score of 8.7 made the show a touchstone of the web-drama era.⁹^•¹⁰^•¹

Spin-offs and adaptations

The franchise expanded across formats. A stage version, Soul Ferry: Fenghua Juedai, followed the web dramas, and the network film Soul Ferry: Yellow Springs (灵魂摆渡·黄泉), produced with the original creative team and released on iQIYI on February 1, 2018, was the IP's first web movie; its revenue split reached 46 million yuan, which its producers described as breaking the industry ceiling for the format.⁴^•¹¹ A musical adaptation, Soul Ferry: Eternal Life (灵魂摆渡之永生), drew on the Classic of Mountains and Seas and toured more than a dozen cities, with Yu Yi reprising Zhao Li.¹² In 2019 Guo Jingyu's company GHY Culture & Media announced a Singapore-inflected "Nanyang version," Soul Ferry: Nanyang Legends, again written by Xiao Jixiangtian and cast largely from Singapore and Malaysia.⁴

By the mid-2020s the series had a cumulative play count near 4.5 billion across three web-drama seasons, one network film, and a run of short dramas, with a stable Douban average above 8.⁵

The 2026 revival: Soul Ferry: 10th Anniversary

Soul Ferry: 10th Anniversary (灵魂摆渡·十年) premiered on iQIYI on June 2, 2026, a Beijing Radio and Television Bureau–supported project produced by iQIYI and GHY Culture & Media, directed by Ju Xingmao, written by Xiao Jixiangtian, and led by the original trio of Yu Yi, Liu Zhiyang, and Xiao Yin. Its "midnight bell" trailer, released on April 26, 2026, drew more than 1.287 million reservations.⁶

The revival adopts the "mid-length drama" (中剧) format: 24 episodes of 15 to 20 minutes each, a category the National Radio and Television Administration first listed separately in its 2025 filing statistics. The story is set ten years after the third season, in the fictional city of Huanhai, where Xia Dongqing and Ya run the Convenience Store No. 444, now converted into a café, and partner with Zhao Hengzhi, a mortal "Night Watchman" who looks exactly like the vanished Zhao Li. It keeps the series' structure of self-contained unit stories nested inside a long main plotline, this time centered on evil spirits that feed on human obsessions to defy heaven and become gods.¹³^•¹⁴^•¹⁵

Reception was split. The iQIYI page lists a score of 8.7, and reviewers praised episodes such as "Dapeng's Obsession," about a dead student repeating his exam routine as a ghost, for the series' signature blend of the supernatural and everyday grief.¹³^•¹⁶ Other critics and viewers were disappointed, arguing that the replacement character Zhao Hengzhi weakened the original trio's dynamic and that the mid-length format had not yet found its own narrative rhythm; commentary asked outright whether the return was a classic revival or nostalgia consumption.¹⁴

The AIGC "Fushengmeng" films

On August 22, 2026, iQIYI released Soul Ferry: Butterfly Dream (灵魂摆渡·蝴蝶梦) and Soul Ferry: Dream of the Heavenly Maiden (灵魂摆渡·天女之梦), the first two entries in the "Fushengmeng" (浮生梦) series of AIGC, or AI-generated-content, network story films. They are the franchise's first works made entirely through an AI production pipeline, with Guo Jingyu as artistic director, Xiao Jixiangtian as writer, Ding Kuan as director, and Li Zhichao as producer. With actor image licensing in place, the original performers Yu Yi, Liu Zhiyang (credited as Liu Xin), and Xiao Yin provided live-action voice work, and motion-transfer technology carried the character performances. The films tell prequel stories about Wuming (Zhao Li's past), Dongqing, and Ya, filling in gaps the series had left open.⁷^•⁵

The two films were produced in under four months. Spectacle sequences that would previously have required green-screen shooting and lengthy post-production, such as the battle of the heavenly maiden at Kunlun, were generated directly, which the producers said reduced costs by orders of magnitude. Commercially, the films passed 3 million yuan in revenue-share box office within three days and 6 million yuan within ten days, reached first and fifth place in Yunhe's film-category effective-play market share over their first weekend, and broke 6600 on iQIYI's internal heat index, making them the highest-rated network story films the platform released in 2026.⁵^•⁷ A third film, Soul Ferry: Dream of the Princess (灵魂摆渡·公主之梦), followed on October 1, 2026.¹⁷

Guo Jingyu framed the experiment as a way to extend the IP's life, saying he chose Soul Ferry for the AI trial because an established story would be easier for audiences to accept than an untested one. He also cautioned that AI does not generate finished art in one step: every stage of production still needs human control, and the hardest part of the two films was not the technology but using AI to hold on to the literary quality and pacing of the script.¹⁸

Legacy

Twelve years after its debut, Soul Ferry is regularly described in Chinese media as a pioneering work of the domestic zhiguai (strange-tales) web-drama genre and as a series with "no substitute" in its niche, one of the few mainstream Chinese productions to present ghosts and ferrymen as real. Its trajectory, from a low-budget 2014 web drama through films, musical theater, a Southeast Asian spin-off, a mid-length revival, and fully AI-generated films, has been used as a case study of how a long-running Chinese streaming IP adapts to successive changes in format and production technology.⁵^•⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Korean and East Asian web series

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

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