Constructing a good story

New hit drama show taps into the nostalgia for Beijing's 'golden age' of real estate, Xu Fan reports.

When Lan Xiaoxi, a seasoned scriptwriter from Nanjing, the capital city of East China's Jiangsu province, was approached to adapt a novel into the TV series All the Way to the Sun, she felt as though she had been transported back to the golden era of China's thriving real estate market.

The 36-episode series, which began showing on China Central Television's channel 8 and streaming on Youku in mid-August, is adapted from the 2018 best-selling novel Da Cheng Xiao Shi (A Small Home in a Metropolis), which chronicles the remarkable growth of the property industry in Beijing from 2007 to 2017.