The numbers tell the story: 68 percent of the shots filmed on real locations. The Road to Splendor (花开锦绣), a 36-episode Ming-dynasty drama starring Ding Yuxi (丁禹兮) and Deng Enxi (邓恩熙), premiered on Tencent Video at noon on August 9, 2026, with more than two million pre-bookings, and began airing on Dragon TV on August 11. Industry tracking, cited by the Video Outlook chart, puts its real-location ratio at 68 percent — against a 19 percent average for costume dramas in the first half of 2026. The share is unusually high for the genre: cobbled lanes, wind-carved rock and real desert dust carry the frame.
Production crews skipped the green screen. Cameras rolled in the Ming-Qing brick lanes of Pingyao Ancient City’s south street (平遥古城), before Cave 12 at the Yungang Grottoes (云冈石窟), and across the Yardang landforms and Mingsha Mountain (鸣沙山) near Dunhuang.
The 68 Percent Rule
Those deep-mansion sequences show what the location budget bought. The art team surveyed 27 Ming-era residential structures and rebuilt the visual language of Shanxi merchant houses — overhanging-gable roofs, interlocking bracket arches and brick-carved gable ornaments. Location scouting took the crew across two provinces, from Shanxi’s brick lanes to the Gobi’s wind-eroded castles, and the surveyed houses fed directly into the rebuilt sets. The horse-battle and escape sequences were shot in the wind-eroded Yardang castles and on Mingsha’s dunes, where the grit of desert sand doubles as the story’s metaphor of leaving the courtyard for the wider world.
Costume work followed the same documentary instinct. Styling director Gao Qiuwan (高秋婉) worked from the Tang Liudian (唐六典), the Tang code’s Wardrobe Bureau (尚衣局), and documents from the Dunhuang Library Cave, designing narrow-sleeved waist-length ru jackets, striped skirts and Banbi (半臂) half-sleeves. Skirt seams were hand-stitched to the 1:1.2 warp-weft ratio of Tang fabrics, and the bronze hairpins were cast one-to-one against artifacts from the Taiyuan kiln site. Makeup director Yang Xiaohai (杨晓海) turned to the murals of Mogao Caves Cave 217 to recreate the Tang court’s Feixia makeup (飞霞妆) and blood-blush eyebrows. The production built more than 800 costumes and 500 looks in total.
Palace Records, Cave Murals, One Costume Team
Audiences on several platforms praised the visuals as “kind to the eyes,” and one commenter noted that “a few shots convey the oppression of the great house.” The hot-search tag “Road to Splendor grassroots word-of-mouth” distilled the consensus: you can argue with the pacing, but not with how real it looks.
The travel payoff is already visible. Xinhua-reported “drama check-in” routes string together the Chang Family Manor (常家庄园), the Manjianghong film studio, the Dunhuang Ancient City film base, Aksai County’s Duobagou poplar canyon and Dunhuang’s poplar forests — a northwest line from the Jin merchants’ courtyards to the Gobi, with poplar stands against the open desert anchoring the western end. Pingyao’s brick lanes, Mingsha Mountain and the canyon have been compiled by fans into summer itineraries, turning the actors’ on-screen footsteps into an actual tour route. With episodes still rolling out through the summer travel season, the location map keeps growing as fans add stops.