General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Under the Microscope (显微镜下的大明之丝绢案)

Under the Microscope (显微镜下的大明之丝绢案, "Under the Microscope: The Silk Reel Case of Daming") is a 14-episode Chinese costume mystery drama that premiered exclusively on the streaming platform iQIYI on 9 February 2023 and concluded on 19 February 2023¹^•². Directed by Pan Anzi and written by the novelist Ma Boyong with Zhou Rongyang, it stars Zhang Ruoyun, Wang Yang, and Qi Wei, with Wu Gang and Gao Yalin in special roles and Fei Qiming in a leading supporting part¹. The series adapts the first story in Ma Boyong's nonfiction collection Under the Microscope (《显微镜下的大明》), the essay "学霸必须死——徽州丝绢案始末" ("The Top Student Must Die: The Full Story of the Huizhou Silk Reel Case"), and it was the first work on which Ma Boyong served as a screenwriter²^•³.

Key fact	Detail
Format	14-episode costume "short drama" (短剧), iQIYI exclusive, one episode per day for VIP members from 9 February 2023¹
Production	Produced by iQIYI with Liubai Film & TV; directed by Pan Anzi; written by Ma Boyong and Zhou Rongyang¹
Source	First story of Ma Boyong's nonfiction collection Under the Microscope: "学霸必须死——徽州丝绢案始末"²
Plot premise	The math-obsessed clerk Shuai Jiamo discovers his county has borne a silk tax owed by eight counties for over a century, and pursues correction up the administrative ladder¹
Reception	Douban 7.8 at opening and 7.9 at the finale; iQIYI heat value passed 8866 within three days; Weibo main topic over 900 million reads⁴^•⁵
Official recognition	Listed by the National Radio and Television Administration among outstanding online audiovisual works of 2023⁶
Overseas release	Broadcast in Japan on WOWOW under the title 天地に問う～Under the Microscope～, followed by a seven-volume DVD release⁷

Spoilers

Plot and adaptation

The series follows Shuai Jiamo (帅家默, played by Zhang Ruoyun), a mathematics obsessive who, while checking tax registers in the county yamen (Chinese county government office under imperial rule) of Renhua in the fictional Jin'an prefecture, finds that his county has alone paid a "poll-tax silk" (人丁丝绢) levy that should have been shared among eight counties for more than a hundred years¹^•¹¹. His attempt to correct the record runs from the county court up through the prefecture and higher offices, drawing litigator Cheng Renqing (程仁清, Wang Yang), the Feng siblings (Qi Wei and Fei Qiming), and a web of magistrates, gentry, and fiscal interests into the dispute¹.

A difficult adaptation. Ma Boyong initially thought a screen version was not feasible. The original essay consists largely of meeting records and argumentation, without the dramatic structure of a novel, and the production company Liubai ultimately pressed him to write the screenplay himself³^•¹². He spent five months on the script, rebuilding characters whose personalities and motives the archival record leaves unclear, and inventing the comic sidekick Feng Baoyu, who grew from a functional supporting part into a member of the protagonist group as the writing progressed⁴. Because the story turns on policy discussion and bureaucratic relations that are hard to dramatize, he added light comedy elements, which he compared to adding a little sugar in cooking, not for sweetness but to bring out flavor⁴.

The adaptation also renamed and reshaped the historical figures: the original protagonist 帅嘉谟 became 帅家默, and the litigator 程任卿 became 程仁清¹³^•⁷. Critics divided over these choices. Some praised the conversion of abstract documentary battles into courtroom confrontations with professional texture in procedure, wording, and archive procedure¹¹. Others argued the drama weakened the original's critical force, turning the historically capable initiator of the case into a naive "calculation fool" who barely understands what he is doing, and surrounding the story with stock character types¹⁴^•¹³.

The source work

The drama draws on Under the Microscope, a collection Ma Boyong published in January 2019 that is not a novel but a work of historical nonfiction: six episodes from Ming dynasty grassroots politics, each reconstructed from archival sources⁸. Ma Boyong has described the book as sitting between genres, everything in it grounded in historical materials, yet carrying his own inferences and judgments, written as readable historical essays rather than academic history⁹.

The origin of the silk reel case essay dates to late 2014, when a friend described the case on Weibo in a hundred or so words. Ma Boyong traced the account to an academic paper, and through that paper's citations to the Silk Reel Case Complete Records (《丝绢全书》), documents preserved from Ming-era Huizhou prefecture. He spent roughly a year and a half working through the primary sources, taught himself legal, political, and economic history, and wrote an account of nearly 100,000 characters⁸^•¹⁰. The case is a rare exception to a general pattern he identified: Chinese historical records concentrate on emperors and generals, while ordinary people's lives are seldom recorded, yet in this case every document, letter, and exchange from a single county dispute survived¹⁰.

The historical case

The real dispute ran from Longqing 4 (1570) to Wanli 7 (1579). In 1570, Shuai Jiamo, a member of the Xin'an Guard, petitioned Huizhou prefecture over the poll-tax silk levy. Examining the account books, he found that Huizhou paid 8,780 bolts of poll-tax silk each year, borne entirely by She county, while the prefecture's other five counties paid nothing¹³.

Under the Collected Statutes of the Great Ming (《大明会典》), a levy collected at the prefecture level should be apportioned among all its counties. Shuai Jiamo concluded that when the tax was first assigned to She county it was recorded as "summer tax silk," and that prefecture clerks, who came from the other five counties, had altered its name so that She county paid the poll-tax silk in its place for over a century¹³.

The five counties resisted, and after litigation Shuai Jiamo, claiming an attempt on his life, fled. Six years later the case was revived, backed by the Minister of Revenue Yin Zhengmao, a She county native who used it to advance the Single Whip Reform (一条鞭法), a fiscal policy consolidating levies and tying them to landholding. His intervention enraged the five counties, whose residents besieged the county yamen in protest¹³.

To calm the unrest, the prefecture canceled a military-provision levy that She county had been paying, leaving the other five counties untaxed. The agitator Cheng Renqing (程任卿) and the original petitioner Shuai Jiamo were made scapegoats; Shuai was sentenced to one hundred strokes of the heavy bamboo, exile three thousand li away, and military service on the frontier. The She county gazetteer nonetheless praised him as a bold man who, "with the person of a commoner, disturbed the gaze of the emperor, and in a single morning overturned a century-old case"¹³.

Reception and performance data

The series opened to a Douban score of 7.8, with 36.5 percent of early raters awarding five stars, and stood at 7.9 when it concluded on 19 February 2023¹⁵^•². On iQIYI its heat value passed 8866 within three days of release, the fastest of any premium short drama on the platform to that point, and the Weibo main topic surpassed 900 million reads⁵^•⁴. Among iQIYI's 2023 dramas it ranked first in average views per episode at 40.64 million for its 14-episode run¹⁶.

Commentators noted that its heat lagged its reputation. Reviewers attributed the gap to the short run, a slow opening, and subject matter, tax accounting and Ming fiscal administration, far from the romance, palace intrigue, or fantasy that drives much costume drama viewership⁴^•¹⁷. The National Radio and Television Administration listed it among the outstanding online dramas of 2023, and iQIYI executives cited it as an example of a title whose release schedule was tailored to the work rather than pushed toward a headline heat figure⁶^•¹⁸.

Later adaptations and overseas release

The series circulated internationally under the English title Under the Microscope and later became available on Amazon Prime Video¹⁹. In Japan it aired on the WOWOW channel as 天地に問う～Under the Microscope～ with a seven-volume DVD release. The Japanese historian Fuma Susumu, whose scholarship on the Huizhou silk case was among the sources Ma Boyong used, reviewed the drama for a Chinese readership and judged its plot far removed from the historical record, while noting that the character Cheng Renqing, played by Wang Yang, had reshaped readers' image of the litigator he had described in his own work⁷^•⁸.

In 2025 a two-person stage adaptation, written and directed by Li Xiang and Wang Anrui, ran at the Poly Star Drama Village (繁星戏剧村) in Beijing, compressing the story into a 120-minute duel of values between Shuai Jiamo and his opponent²⁰. Ma Boyong has said the remaining five stories of Under the Microscope are also slated for screen development, with the silk reel case serving as the pilot for the series².

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 Sp to Z

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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