Frost in Classical Chinese Poetry: The Literary DNA of First Frost

First Frost (难哄, Nán Hǒng) hit #1 on Netflix's global Chinese-language rankings in 2025 with an emotional register that felt unusually classical for a modern romance — a quiet melancholy, a visual preference for autumn into winter, a willingness to let a scene breathe. That register isn't invented. It's inherited. Chinese poets have been writing about frost for over a thousand years, and the drama's entire visual and emotional vocabulary draws from their tradition.

Frost — 霜 (shuāng) — is one of the most loaded single characters in classical Chinese poetry. It carries cold, yes, but also clarity, old age, endurance, loneliness, moral integrity, and the specific Chinese virtue of beauty made more beautiful by the cold. A leaf untouched by frost is just a leaf. A leaf burned red by it is poetry.

Here are the four poetic sources the drama's cultural memory draws from — and the idioms they seeded.

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Du Mu: The Blazing Autumn

The most quoted line about frost in the entire Chinese poetic canon comes from Tang Dynasty poet Du Mu (杜牧, 803–852 CE). The poem is called 《山行》 — Mountain Travel — and it's taught to every Chinese schoolchild.

The Full Poem

远上寒山石径斜 Yuǎn shàng hán shān shí jìng xié Far up the cold mountain, the stone path slants

白云生处有人家 Bái yún shēng chù yǒu rén jiā Where the white clouds form, there are people's homes

停车坐爱枫林晚 Tíng chē zuò ài fēng lín wǎn I stop the carriage, lingering for the maple grove at evening

霜叶红于二月花 Shuāng yè hóng yú èr yuè huā Frost-touched leaves, redder than spring flowers.

Why This Line Mattered

The last line — 霜叶红于二月花 — quietly inverted the entire Chinese poetic tradition. For centuries, spring flowers had been the canonical image of beauty: peach blossoms, plum blossoms, the fleeting pinks of the second lunar month (二月花). Every poet before Du Mu had measured autumn against spring and found it wanting.

Du Mu's line says: the autumn leaves, burned by frost, are more red than anything spring can produce.

The implication is radical. Cold doesn't destroy beauty. It concentrates it. A leaf that has survived the first frost is more vivid than a leaf that never faced it.

In the Drama

Wen Yifan is Du Mu's frost leaf. The drama lingers on her, slowly, unhurriedly, the way Du Mu's speaker "stops the carriage." She is more interesting than she would have been undamaged. That is a hard thing for a modern romance to say without romanticizing trauma — and First Frost mostly manages it, partly because Chinese viewers arrive at the story with Du Mu's line already embedded in their cultural memory.

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Zhang Ji: The Lonely Bell

The second great frost poem in Chinese is Zhang Ji's (张继, 8th century CE) 《枫桥夜泊》 — Mooring by Maple Bridge at Night. It's one of the most famous short poems in the language.

The Opening Couplet

月落乌啼霜满天 Yuè luò wū tí shuāng mǎn tiān The moon sets, a crow cries, frost fills the sky

江枫渔火对愁眠 Jiāng fēng yú huǒ duì chóu mián Riverside maples and fishing fires lie opposite my sleepless grief.

The Image

Zhang Ji wrote this after failing the imperial examination. He is moored for the night near a small town, unable to sleep, and what he sees is every classical Chinese image of loneliness stacked into fourteen characters: the setting moon, the crow's cry, the frost, and the fishing boats' distant lanterns reflected on the river.

The phrase 霜满天 — frost fills the sky — isn't meteorologically accurate. Frost doesn't actually fill the sky; it settles on surfaces. Zhang Ji means the feeling of the cold is so total that it saturates everything. The sky itself is frost.

In the Drama

First Frost's night scenes — Wen Yifan alone in the apartment, Sang Yan watching her from across a room — borrow Zhang Ji's emotional geometry. The drama understands that loneliness at night has a specific Chinese visual grammar: a single lamp, an open window, a chill that isn't quite in the room but isn't exactly outside either. You don't need to quote the poem. The poem is already in the air.

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Su Shi: The Frost-Defiant Branch

Su Shi (苏轼, 1037–1101 CE) — also known as Su Dongpo — is perhaps the most versatile poet in Chinese history. He wrote a famous four-line poem as a gift to his friend Liu Jingwen, titled 《赠刘景文》.

The Key Lines

荷尽已无擎雨盖 Hé jìn yǐ wú qíng yǔ gài The lotus is gone, nothing left to hold the rain

菊残犹有傲霜枝 Jú cán yóu yǒu ào shuāng zhī The chrysanthemum withers, but a frost-defiant branch remains.

The Key Phrase: 傲霜

傲霜 (ào shuāng) — to stand proud against the frost — became one of the most important phrases in Chinese moral vocabulary. Su Shi was writing during political exile; the poem is about friendship under difficult conditions, and the implicit subject is people who keep their integrity when the times demand otherwise.

Chinese culture already valued the pine (松), bamboo (竹), and plum blossom (梅) as the "Three Friends of Winter" (岁寒三友, suì hán sān yǒu) — the three plants that retain their form when everything else collapses in the cold. Su Shi added the chrysanthemum to this lineage, and 傲霜 became the adjective for any living thing that refuses to be diminished by hardship.

In the Drama

Wen Yifan is 傲霜. Not in the grand sense of a political dissident, but in the everyday sense of a woman who kept her shape through a childhood that could have deformed her. The drama doesn't use the word. It doesn't have to. Any Chinese viewer looking at her knows what they are seeing.

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The Persimmon Tree and 凌霜

The fourth source is not a poem but a legend — the Ming Dynasty story of 凌霜侯 (Líng Shuāng Hóu, the Frost-Defying Marquis), the persimmon tree that saved the future emperor Zhu Yuanzhang from starvation. We covered the full legend in our solar term guide to 霜降. Here the relevant piece is the phrase 凌霜 itself.

傲霜 vs 凌霜: A Fine Distinction

Both 傲霜 and 凌霜 describe frost-defiance, but the nuance differs:

• 傲霜 (ào shuāng) — proudly standing against frost. The subject is usually something noble, often vegetable: a chrysanthemum, a pine, a person of integrity.
• 凌霜 (líng shuāng) — overcoming or transcending frost. The subject has actively won against the cold. There's more agency in 凌.

In classical usage, 傲霜 is descriptive ("the chrysanthemum stands proud") while 凌霜 is heroic ("the persimmon tree defied the frost and saved an emperor"). Wen Yifan starts as 傲霜 — quietly resistant — and, over the course of the drama, becomes 凌霜 — a person who has actively won something back from the cold.

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Three Chengyu the Poetic Tradition Seeded

Frost poetry didn't stay confined to poems. Over centuries, the images crystallized into chengyu that Chinese speakers still use today.

雪中送炭 — "Sending Charcoal in the Snow"

雪中送炭 (xuě zhōng sòng tàn) — literally "in the snow, send charcoal." The chengyu describes an act of help delivered exactly when it is needed most. Not gifts in fair weather. Aid when a person is freezing.

In the drama: Every small kindness Sang Yan shows Wen Yifan is 雪中送炭. He isn't waiting for big moments. He's bringing warmth when the cold is worst — the late-night snack, the rearranged schedule, the silent removal of something that would have hurt her. This chengyu names exactly the love language the drama is teaching.

冰天雪地 — "Sky of Ice, Ground of Snow"

冰天雪地 (bīng tiān xuě dì) describes a landscape entirely covered in ice and snow — total winter. The phrase carries the weight of extremity: when everything around you is cold, what you do in the cold matters more.

In the drama: Wen Yifan's inner landscape when the drama begins is 冰天雪地. Not winter as season, but winter as a state of being — a place where warmth has to be carried in, because it isn't going to arrive by itself.

如履薄冰 — "As If Walking on Thin Ice"

如履薄冰 (rú lǚ báo bīng) describes behavior in a situation so delicate that a single wrong step could shatter everything. Originally from the Classic of Poetry (诗经), one of the oldest texts in Chinese literature.

In the drama: Every scene between Sang Yan and Wen Yifan in the early episodes is 如履薄冰. He is choosing his words with inhuman care. Too direct and she will retreat; too distant and she will think he doesn't mind. The chengyu captures the emotional choreography of courting someone with trauma.

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Why This Matters for Understanding the Drama

First Frost is not quoting these poets overtly. It doesn't have to. The Chinese cultural memory is loaded with their lines, and the drama's visual and emotional choices activate that memory whether a viewer consciously remembers the sources or not:

• Du Mu taught Chinese viewers that frost-touched beauty is more vivid than untouched beauty — which is why Wen Yifan's damage makes her more compelling, not less
• Zhang Ji's frost-saturated loneliness is the drama's night-scene visual grammar — single lamps, open windows, a cold that isn't quite locatable
• Su Shi's 傲霜 is the adjective for Wen Yifan's character arc — a frost-defiant branch that refused to wither
• The pairing of 傲霜 (quiet resistance) and 凌霜 (active victory) is her personal evolution — she moves from enduring the cold to winning something from it
• The three chengyu 雪中送炭, 冰天雪地, 如履薄冰 compress the drama's love language into three phrases — help arriving in the cold, a landscape that is all cold, the delicate footwork of reaching through it

A good C-drama doesn't need its audience to have read Du Mu or Zhang Ji. It just needs its audience to have absorbed them through a lifetime of Chinese schooling, grandparents' conversations, and Lunar New Year couplets on doorframes. First Frost was written for exactly that audience — one that would feel the poems in their bones even when no one quoted a single line.

Frost fills the sky. The chrysanthemum withers, but the branch remains. Leaves, after the cold, are redder than flowers.

That is the air the drama is breathing.

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Continue exploring: Browse Chinese sayings about patience — the quiet persistence that makes 傲霜 possible. Or the ancient Chinese wisdom quotes list, which gathers the classical lines this drama's mood inherits.

Chinese idioms in this article: 雪中送炭 — Aid in the snow, 冰天雪地 — Total winter, 如履薄冰 — Walking on thin ice, 锲而不舍 — Never giving up carving. See also our Chinese proverbs hub and all 1,000+ Chinese idioms.