Xing'an Mountains Strange Tales (兴安岭诡事)

Name: Xing'an Mountains Strange Tales (兴安岭诡事)
Released: 2025-02-19

Ding Kuan2025

AIPopDB score: 21/100
Format: Series
Year: 2025
Views: 3.6K

Synopsis

Xing'an Mountains Strange Tales (兴安岭诡事) is set in the forests and snowfields of the Greater Khingan Range in China's northeast. Its first episode, as the uploader describes it, follows a retired bandit who leads a party into the mountains to find a hidden vault said to hold the treasure of Japan's Kwantung Army, and to uncover a secret that has stayed buried.

The protagonist is a man called Biaozi (彪子), who receives the mission from a senior officer. The story draws on Northeast China folklore, including the "Five Immortals" of local legend, and sets its party against black bears, avalanches and zombies. Reporting on the series describes it as a mystery-adventure with a patriotic strand, and notes that its look recalls the wartime "resistance dramas" of older Chinese television.

The series runs to 11 short episodes. The first five were free to watch and the last six were locked behind a payment on Douyin; it has since been made free.

Last Updated 3 November 2026

About the Show

Xing'an Mountains Strange Tales is an AI-made live-action-style microdrama of 11 episodes of roughly one to two minutes each, released on 19 February 2025 on Douyin's native app, the Fengmang app and Bilibili. China News and other Chinese outlets call it the country's first paid AI short drama, and the first purely AI-generated paid microdrama. It was made by the Chinese company 炬核智能 (Juhe Intelligence, founded in August 2024), with 陈采瑩 (Chen Caiying) named as chief producer and 丁宽 (Ding Kuan) as director.

The team was small. One report says seven people worked for about four and a half months, and that the script was revised more than ten times because the video models of the time could not follow the creators' requests, so the story was bent to what the models could produce. Another report says the cost was about 600,000 yuan, a fraction of a conventional shoot, and that the project turned a profit. The director has described an AI workflow covering storyboarding, image and video generation, and prompt writing.

Originally planned as five episodes of about three minutes, the series was split into 11 to support a paid format. On Douyin the first five episodes were free and unlocking the remaining six cost roughly 5 to 9 yuan. Reports say it passed 10 million plays within 21 hours and more than 100 million plays across platforms, about 57 million of them on Douyin, and earned over 300,000 yuan of Douyin native revenue in under a week. Chen Caiying has said character and scene consistency was about 60 to 70 percent in this first series, against about 98 percent in later work.

The series is described as having started the commercialisation of AI microdramas in China. A sequel, Xing'an Mountains Strange Tales 2, launched in December 2025, taking about three and a half months to make and running about twice as long as the first. The director has also spoken of follow-up series in the same regional-mystery universe. A 12-plus-episode English-subtitled version has been uploaded to YouTube by the channel 花生劇場 (Peanut Drama), which also posted the full series as a single video.

Fun Facts

Small team: A team of seven spent about four and a half months on the 11 episodes, revising the script more than ten times to fit what the video models could generate.; Source: tidenews.com.cn
Budget: Reports put the cost at about 600,000 yuan, against an estimated 4 to 5 million yuan for a conventional shoot; the project is said to have turned a profit.; Source: tidenews.com.cn