The costume drama Ting Yin (听银) wrapped filming on August 19, Qixi Festival day, and released its wrap special the same week. The series, a revenge-and-scheming web drama adapted from the novel of the same name by Ban Jie Mingyue (半截明月) on Zhihu’s Yanyan fiction platform, completed its 35-day shoot as a co-production of Mango TV and the Damang Studio. It is scheduled to air on Hunan Satellite TV and Mango TV, with no premiere date announced yet.
Chu Tingyin (楚听银) is sold by her own father as a “cairen” (菜人), a grim term for humans traded as provisions in famine-struck times. After her mother drowns in despair, she vows to overturn the crumbling world: she passes through a brothel fire, joins bandits and fights on battlefields, and relies on a talent for telling true metal from false by its ring — the “ting yin” of the title — to steer her own fate. Along the way she meets Shen Nianzhang (沈念璋), the son of Weicheng’s (卫城) richest man, who looks like an idle spendthrift but hides a sharp mind. Together they navigate court intrigue until Chu Tingyin breaks free of every restraint, founds the Zhao kingdom and takes the throne. Her line “I will be no one’s concubine and no one’s wife” became the drama’s calling card, and the script gives her no “golden finger”, the plot-granted cheat common in the genre. As ruler, she enacts reforms that let women go into business and hold office.
Three-Stage Looks on a Song-Era Base
Song-dynasty dress anchors the wardrobe, and the heroine’s costumes track her transformation in three stages. Early scenes keep her in gray, mud-stained clothes that underline her origins as a war orphan; the middle arc switches to pale Hanfu with a plain hairpin as her temperament calms; the final stretch moves into lavish, power-heavy styling fit for an empress. Darren Chen (官鸿), as Shen Nianzhang, wears Song-base robes and armor in light yellow, green and purple, a palette meant to balance his character’s idle-playboy surface with hidden competence.
At a media group interview during the wrap, both leads picked the same kind of moment from opposite ends of the story. Chen said the hardest material was the loss of his sister, a thread built entirely on script and imagination because no location footage existed, which left the emotional connection thin. Zhao Qing (赵晴), who plays Chu Tingyin, chose the enthronement scene: complex, she said, because the character must carry both hope for the future and the memory of everything she lost to reach it.
The shoot began July 16, 2026, under director Chen Nan (陈楠), with Wang Junhao, Zuo Linjie, Li Youchuan, Zhang Jing, Li Jiaxin and Tong Yilang in supporting roles and Wang Binghao in a featured part. On-set clips of the two leads’ kissing scenes and interactions circulated widely during filming, with fans praising the pair as a costume-drama couple whose scenes “oozed atmosphere” and calling the casting an unusually close fit for the genre. With principal photography closed, attention now turns to the premiere date.