Against the Current (兰香如故) Filming Locations: The 40-Mu Ming Garden Hengdian Built From Nothing — and Kept

Most costume dramas rent their scenery. Against the Current (兰香如故) built its own, and then did the unusual thing: it did not tear it down.

The Lin mansion you are watching Tan Songyun move through is a 25,047-square-metre classical garden — roughly 40 mu, about six acres — raised from bare ground at Hengdian for this production, by hand, over eight months. It is now reported to be permanently preserved. That makes this one of the rare c-drama location pieces with an actual destination at the end of it.

Here is what was built, what it was copied from, and what you should check before you book anything.

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The short version

• Where: Hengdian Film and Television City (横店影视城), Dongyang, Zhejiang province.
• What: A purpose-built Ming-style Jiangnan garden of 25,047 m², about 40 mu.
• Built: Art-department preparation from July 2024; ground broken November 2024; completed July 2025 — roughly eight months of construction after four months of design work.
• Afterwards: Not struck. Chinese reporting says it was folded into Hengdian's Jiangnan garden area and opened to visitors as a "林府一日游" — a "Lin Mansion day tour."

That last point is the one worth dwelling on, and also the one to verify before travelling. More on that below.

Built, not borrowed

The scale of this is unusual even by Hengdian standards. Sina's production coverage describes a garden of 25,047 square metres containing the full classical vocabulary — 亭台楼阁 (pavilions, terraces, towers and halls), covered walkways, water pavilions and studios — with, in the phrase used repeatedly in Chinese coverage, 一砖一瓦 built by working craftsmen: every brick, every tile. No green screen standing in for architecture, and no existing scenic area dressed up.

The timeline explains the result. The art team began preparing in July 2024. Before drawing anything final they went to Suzhou and Nanjing to survey surviving classical gardens in person, and worked through four successive versions of the site plan before committing. Construction started in November 2024 and finished in July 2025.

For a production that premiered on September 11, 2026, that is a set commissioned more than two years ahead of broadcast.

What it was copied from

Two reference points come up in the reporting, and both are worth knowing because they tell you what kind of Ming this is.

《园冶》 and the governing principle. The design brief Chinese coverage quotes is 虽由人作，宛自天开 — suī yóu rén zuò, wǎn zì tiān kāi, "though made by human hands, it appears as though opened by heaven itself." This is the most famous line in Chinese garden theory, from 《园冶》 (Yuán Yě, "The Craft of Gardens"), Ji Cheng's 1631 treatise — a late-Ming book about how to build exactly this kind of garden. Using it as the design principle for a Ming-set drama is not decoration; it is the period's own manual.

拙政园 and 《南都繁会图》. The reporting names the Humble Administrator's Garden (拙政园) in Suzhou — the largest and most celebrated of the Suzhou classical gardens, and itself a sixteenth-century Ming creation — among the models, alongside 《南都繁会图》, the Ming scroll painting of the bustling streets of Nanjing, the "Southern Capital."

So the composite is coherent: a Suzhou garden's spatial logic, a Nanjing scroll's sense of a lived-in Ming city, and a late-Ming theorist's rule about making artifice look like weather.

The planting follows the same discipline — spring peach, summer lotus, autumn maple, winter plum, so the garden reads a different season depending where the camera stands. Window lattices carry 卷草云纹, scrolling-vine and cloud motifs; the paving works in flowers, birds, fish, insects and cloud patterns.

知春馆 — the hall at the centre, and its line

The core set has a name, and the name is the best single detail in the whole production.

It is called 知春馆 (Zhī Chūn Guǎn), which you could render as the Hall of Knowing Spring. The name is taken from the line 「草木见知春，萌芽处处新」 — cǎo mù jiàn zhī chūn, méng yá chù chù xīn: "the grasses and trees see and know the spring; the new shoots are everywhere."

Chinese coverage says the hall carries the heroine's arc across the roughly sixty years the character spans — from a great house's daughter, to a servant, to the woman who runs a household. Read the line against that and the choice is obvious. Grass and trees do not announce the spring. They register it, silently, from underneath, and the evidence is that something is suddenly growing in every direction at once. For a character whose entire method is to be underestimated in plain sight, it is a better mission statement than any dialogue could be.

I have not been able to trace the couplet to a specific classical source, and I am not going to invent one for it. What is documented is that the production named its central hall after it.

The costumes: 苏绣 and 缂丝

The garden gets the headlines, but the wardrobe is the other half of the "how did they afford this" question.

The production used 苏绣 (Sū xiù, Suzhou embroidery) and 缂丝 (kè sī, kesi silk tapestry) in the costumes, plus plant-based dyeing. Both crafts are 国家级非物质文化遗产 — on China's first national intangible cultural heritage list, inscribed in 2006. Suzhou kesi weaving was additionally recognised by UNESCO in 2009, as part of China's sericulture and silk craftsmanship.

缂丝 is the expensive one, and it is worth understanding why. Its defining technique is 通经断纬 — "continuous warp, broken weft." The warp threads run the full length of the cloth, but each colour of weft is woven back and forth only across the small area where that colour belongs, then cut. You are not embroidering a picture onto silk; you are weaving the picture as the cloth itself, region by region, like a mosaic. The finished piece reads identically from both sides. The Chinese phrase for the cost is 一寸缂丝一寸金 — an inch of kesi, an inch of gold — and kesi's traditional epithet is 织中之圣, "the sage among weavings."

Put a kesi panel on a Ming official's wife and you have said more about that household's standing than a line of dialogue would.

Can you actually visit?

This is where I want to be careful, because it is the part readers will act on.

What is reported: Chinese entertainment coverage states that after filming the garden was not demolished but 归入横店江南园林区 — absorbed into Hengdian's Jiangnan garden area — and opened as a "林府一日游", a Lin Mansion day tour, explicitly as a reusable "film → broadcast → tourism" asset, following the path Flourished Peony cut when it turned Luoyang into a destination.

What I could not confirm: Hengdian's own official channels list the park's established ticketed areas — 明清宫苑, 秦王宫, 明清民居博览城, 广州街·香港街, 清明上河图, 梦幻谷, 圆明新园 — and I could not find the Lin mansion garden published as its own named, separately ticketed scenic area on those official pages. That does not mean it is closed; new sets are frequently folded into existing areas, or opened on a limited schedule, long before the English-facing pages catch up.

So: treat the garden as real and standing — that is well reported — and treat public access as reported but unconfirmed. If you are making a trip of it, check Hengdian's official site or ticketing channels for the current status before you go, rather than trusting a drama article. Including this one.

Hengdian itself is in Dongyang (东阳), Jinhua, Zhejiang — reachable from Hangzhou, and the standard visit is two days rather than one if you want more than a single area.

Why this one might stick

Sets survive when the tourism value outlives the show. That has happened before: Flourished Peony sent real traffic to Luoyang, and the Hengdian coverage explicitly names it as the model here.

What makes this case slightly different is that the Lin mansion was built as a garden rather than a street or a palace. A garden is a thing you walk slowly through, photograph, and sit down in. It is also, unlike a palace facade, period-neutral enough to host a hundred other productions. If Hengdian keeps it, it will not be sentimentality — it will be that a 40-mu Ming garden is a genuinely useful thing to own.

Either way, the eight months are the story. Something like 苦尽甘来, if you want the idiom for it, and the garden earned it before a single frame was shot.

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Related

• What time period is Against the Current set in?
• Against the Current characters and the Lin household chart
• The real Luoyang behind Flourished Peony
• Hidden Love: the real Xiamen filming locations
• First Frost: the real Chongqing locations