General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Spring in a Small Town (小城之春) (1948 film)

Spring in a Small Town (小城之春) is a 1948 Chinese black-and-white drama directed by Fei Mu (費穆), written by Li Tianji, and produced by the Wenhua Film Company in Shanghai. It tells of a married woman in a ruined postwar town whose husband's visiting friend turns out to be her former lover, and it is now widely regarded as one of the greatest Chinese films ever made.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Production	Wenhua Film Company, Shanghai; directed by Fei Mu, written by Li Tianji; black and white, Mandarin, 1.33:1¹
Running time	98 minutes per the China Film Archive and Hong Kong Film Archive listings; other catalogs list 85 to 93 minutes¹^•³^•²
Principal cast	Wei Wei (Zhou Yuwen), Shi Yu (Dai Liyan), Li Wei (Zhang Zhichen), Zhang Hongmei (Dai Xiu), Cui Chaoming (Old Huang)⁴
Key crew	Cinematography Li Shengwei, music Huang Yijun, sound Miao Zhenyu, editing Xu Ming and Wei Shunbao⁴
Shooting period	About 101 days, early March to 9 June 1948; interiors built in a studio, exteriors shot in Songjiang⁵
Initial reception	Attacked by leftist critics as pale, sickly, and out of touch with the times; a box-office failure⁶^•⁷
Later standing	First place in the Hong Kong Film Awards' 2005 poll of the 100 greatest Chinese-language films; fifth in a 2011 Golden Horse poll of 122 film professionals⁸
Restorations	2K restoration in 2014; 4K restoration from the original nitrate negative with the complete orchestral score recovered, premiered at Toronto in September 2026⁹

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in 1946, a year after the end of the Sino-Japanese War, in a damaged town in the Jiangnan region.¹⁰^•¹¹ The Dai family compound has been ruined by eight years of war. Zhou Yuwen (周玉纹), about 26 years old, lives in a loveless marriage with her sickly husband Dai Liyan (戴礼言), who lost the family property in the war and has lost the will to face life; the household is completed by Liyan's younger sister Dai Xiu (戴秀) and the old servant Lao Huang (老黄).¹² Yuwen's days consist of shopping, fetching her husband's Chinese medicine, embroidering in her sister-in-law's room, and walking alone on the town wall.¹³

The visit of the young doctor Zhang Zhichen (章志忱), Liyan's friend of eight years' separation, breaks the stagnation. Zhichen was Yuwen's lover before her marriage, and feelings remain on both sides, while Dai Xiu also grows fond of him.¹^•¹³ The film's Chinese publicity phrase for the triangle was "近于冶荡，不及于乱", desire close to license that never crosses into disorder.⁵ When Liyan decides to step aside and takes an overdose of medicine, Yuwen recognizes her feeling for her husband; in the end she chooses to resume life with him and Zhichen leaves the small town.¹ The British Film Institute describes the result as a tense chamber work of suspicion, suppressed longing, and half-spoken truths, carried by Wei Wei's performance and Yuwen's wistful voiceover.²

Origins of the production

A filler film that became a classic. The film exists because of a scheduling accident. In early 1948 the two productions then shooting at Wenhua, Cao Yu's The Sunny Sky and Hong Mo's The Good Couple, were running behind schedule, and the owner Wu Xingzai wanted a cheap extra picture to fill the gap and spread the studio rental costs. The script at hand was the first screenplay of the novice Li Tianji, written in the summer of 1947 under the title Ku Lian (苦恋, later retitled Lost Love), which had been rejected by several Shanghai studios before Wu Zuguang passed it to Cao Yu, who sent it to Wenhua.⁵ None of Wenhua's four staff directors wanted a low-plot love story, but Fei Mu, who happened to be free while preparing China's first color film, the Mei Lanfang opera film Eternal Regret (生死恨), agreed at once.⁵^•⁷

Fei Mu revised the script with Li Tianji in three private meetings. He asked for scenes to be cut, reportedly compressing more than 180 scenes to about 80, while insisting that "the drama must not be cut"; the doctor Zhichen and an old physician were merged into one character, the romance between Zhichen and Dai Xiu was trimmed, and the material between Zhichen and Yuwen was concentrated.¹⁴^•⁵ At their first meeting Fei Mu detected the influence of Su Shi's ci poem "Die Lian Hua" (蝶恋花) in the script, which startled Li Tianji; the two also settled the title Spring in a Small Town together.⁵ Li Tianji later said Fei Mu's cutting was "pointing stone into gold".¹⁵ Shooting ran about 101 days, unusually fast for the notoriously slow director, and the film premiered in Shanghai in late September 1948.⁵

Style

The film uses only five characters, few conflicts, and a small number of settings, and it renders desire that "stirs from feeling but stops at propriety" (发乎情，止乎礼义) with an aesthetic of reserve and implication.¹⁶ Fei Mu combined long takes, deep-focus shots, and dissolves within scenes, and gave the wife a strange, dreamlike voiceover that comments on and sometimes contradicts her own actions.⁷ Critics have read the ruined garden, the walls, and the vegetation growing in their crevices as images of a declining gentry family and of China after the war, and the film draws on the classical Chinese poetic tradition of using scenery to carry feeling.¹^•⁷ The film does not avoid its moment: the opening states that the Dai mansion was destroyed by eight years of war, Yuwen wears the fashionably voluminous permanent wave of the 1940s, Zhichen wears a postwar American-style trench coat, and a northwestern folk song popularized after the war by Wang Luobin's arrangement is heard.⁵

Reception, disappearance, and rediscovery

At its September 1948 release the film met a divided response. Some reviewers praised its style, one calling it an unprecedented artistic peak, but leftist critics attacked it as "pale" and "sickly", saying it had "completely forgotten the era", and it was a box-office failure.⁶^•⁷ Fei Mu acknowledged that his bold use of long takes and slow pacing had made the film too dull and that not pointing a way out was his own failing; the actress Wei Wei later said the film did not lose money and did well in some mid-sized cities.⁵ After 1949 the film was effectively buried in mainland China, condemned in official film history for petit-bourgeois decadence and for allegedly numbing the will to struggle; Fei Mu left for Hong Kong in 1949 and died in 1951 without completing another film.⁶^•⁷

Rediscovery. The film was screened abroad in 1982, shown at a Hong Kong retrospective of Chinese film classics in 1983, and championed by Hong Kong critics and researchers including Li Cheuk-to and the late Wong Ain-ling; from the 1980s and 1990s its reputation rose steadily.⁶^•¹⁷ In 1995 it was named one of ten classic works of Chinese cinema's first 90 years, and in 2005, the centenary of Chinese film, the Hong Kong Film Awards poll placed it first among the 100 greatest Chinese-language films; a 2011 Golden Horse poll of 122 senior film professionals ranked it fifth.⁸^•¹⁸ In the British magazine Sight & Sound's critics poll of the greatest films, it received 13 votes from 846 critics, placing it 127th.¹⁸ Directors who have cited it as a formative influence include Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, Stanley Kwan, and Wong Kar-wai.⁷

Remake and restorations

Tian Zhuangzhuang remade the film in 2002 as Springtime in a Small Town, with Mark Lee Ping Bing as cinematographer. The remake keeps the same triangle but drops the original's first-person voiceover, favors distant shots over close-ups, and adds extensive camera movement to the original's relatively static long takes.¹⁹

The China Film Archive completed a 2K restoration in 2014, based on safety copies, which circulated widely at home and abroad.⁹^•¹⁷ For the 120th anniversary of Fei Mu's birth the archive carried out a new 4K restoration from the film's 35 mm original nitrate negative. The work began with half a lost line of dialogue and led to a larger discovery: a 1948 print preserved the film's complete orchestral score, showing that the sparse soundtrack of previously circulated versions resulted from damage rather than the director's design. The restored version has a reconstructed 5.1-channel track and the recovered line, "Today's Sunday, no school, changed into a qipao!"⁹ The 4K restoration was selected for the Classics program of the 51st Toronto International Film Festival and had its world premiere there on 16 September 2026, followed by an Asian premiere as the opening film of the 10th Pingyao International Film Festival.²⁰^•²¹

References

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