The Real Chongqing Behind First Frost (难哄): Locations, Mist, and Why the City Plays Nanwu

First Frost (难哄) takes place in a city called Nanwu (南梧). You can search "Nanwu" on a Chinese map and nothing comes up. That's because it doesn't exist — it's a fictional location invented by author Zhu Yi (竹已), shared between Hidden Love and First Frost as the home city of the Sang family. In Hidden Love, Nanwu is cozy nostalgia. In First Frost, it's harder — the same place, seen through trauma.

But every street, restaurant, park, and staircase you see on screen is real. The production filmed from February to June 2024 primarily in Chongqing (重庆), the mountain-river-fog megacity in southwestern China. Here is what you are actually looking at when you watch.

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Why Chongqing?

Chongqing is one of China's four direct-administered municipalities (alongside Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin), with a population north of 32 million across its metropolitan region. It sits at the confluence of the Jialing and Yangtze rivers. The city is built on near-vertical terrain — "the mountain city" (山城, shānchéng) is its oldest nickname — which means buildings are stacked up cliffs, streets cross at different elevations, and you can ride an elevator down several stories and emerge on street level.

This topography does something specific to cinematography. A single frame can hold three elevations, two weather systems, and a river in the distance. Fog rolls through in the morning and lingers until afternoon. Neon signs against concrete cliffsides read half-dystopian, half-Wong Kar-wai.

Chinese filmmakers have been using Chongqing for that aesthetic for decades. The city has stood in for generic "atmospheric Chinese city" in dozens of productions. It reads instantly as cinematic without being specific. If you want a city that feels emotionally true without making a statement about Beijing, Shanghai, or any other named location, Chongqing is the default choice.

For First Frost, this is perfect. Nanwu is supposed to be where Wen Yifan grew up — a real place to her, full of real memories — but also a city she can't fully escape. Chongqing's geography encodes that: vertical, foggy, impossible to see clearly from any one spot.

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Central Park (中央公园) — The Opening Scenes

Central Park in Chongqing's Yubei District is one of the drama's most-screenshotted locations. The park is a massive European-style landscaped green space opened in January 2013, with sweeping lawns, a fountain plaza, and long open walkways. Its visual scale serves the drama's version of Nanwu: a city that's grown up, modernized, and can hold a lot of emotional weather in its wide spaces.

Central Park hosts one of the drama's most-discussed outdoor scenes — a rainy exchange between Wen Yifan and Sang Yan shot on the park's open paths, where the geography forces the characters into the kind of exposed, walk-and-talk intimacy that Chinese drama usually reserves for riverside scenes. The width of the park, the uncovered sky, and the visible rain combine to make the moment unavoidable for both characters. There is no indoor to retreat to.

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C97 Cultural Park (C97文创园) — "Overtime" the Bar

Sang Yan's bar — named 加班 (Jiābān, "Overtime") — is one of the drama's most-discussed locations. Fans flew to Chongqing in 2025 looking for it. The bar itself was a set; the surrounding exterior shots are C97 Cultural Park (胜利C97文创园) in Shapingba District, one of Chongqing's converted industrial zones turned creative-industry hubs.

C97 is a former military factory compound that was adapted into studios, cafes, design offices, and small venues. The exposed-brick aesthetic, the hand-painted signage, the mix of old industrial bones with contemporary independent retail — this is the texture of urban adult life in modern Chinese cities, and First Frost leans into it hard. Sang Yan running a bar in a converted warehouse district isn't just set dressing. It's a statement about who he is: a former programmer who has built an adult life one deliberate choice at a time, in a city that rewards that kind of quiet self-authoring.

If you visit C97 today, you will find the exterior locations. The bar set has been dismantled, but fans routinely leave notes and photographs at the specific doorway that served as "Overtime" on camera.

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Nanbin Park (南滨路 / 南滨公园) — The Yangtze Scenes

Chongqing's Nanbin Road runs along the southern bank of the Yangtze, across from the Jiefangbei central business district. Nanbin Park, which stretches along the road, is the city's default romantic-walk location: the Yangtze in front of you, the downtown skyline across the water, the Monument to the People's Liberation behind you. At night, the skyline lights up in a kind of regulated Blade Runner glow that has made Chongqing a pilgrimage site for C-drama fans.

Several First Frost scenes — particularly ones that require the characters to speak honestly in a wide, open space — were filmed along Nanbin Road. The drama's emotional grammar includes these moments: characters walking beside water, the city reflected behind them, words that they can finally say because no one around them is listening.

Chinese viewers reading the drama's location choices often comment on this: 他们去了滨江路 ("they went to the riverside"). Riverside scenes carry specific emotional weight in Chinese television — a space neither private (the home) nor public (the office), where the characters can temporarily exit the social scripts that bind them.

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Beiyu Memory Noodles (北渝记忆面馆) — The Confession Scene

One of the drama's most-screenshotted scenes is a small noodle-shop interaction that fans call the "confession scene" — without giving away specifics, it's a moment where Sang Yan deliberately slows down a conversation by ordering noodles, drinking water, and refusing to let the moment pass.

The location is Beiyu Memory Noodles (北榆记忆小面), a small family-run xiaomian shop in Chongqing. Xiaomian (小面, literally "small noodles") is Chongqing's iconic breakfast dish — alkaline wheat noodles in a spicy Sichuan-style broth, topped with scallions, peanuts, and preserved vegetables. It is the quintessential cheap honest Chongqing meal, available on nearly every street corner before 9 a.m.

Filming there was a choice. The drama could have staged the scene in any location. Choosing a xiaomian shop instead of a cafe tells you something about Sang Yan as a character — his version of comfort food is the one he grew up with, and the conversation about to happen needs to be grounded in ordinary texture, not aesthetic backdrop. Beiyu Memory Noodles has been swamped by First Frost fans since the drama aired. If you visit, expect a queue.

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Jingzhong Restaurant (晶宗火锅) — The Family Dinner Scenes

Chongqing is famous nationally for hot pot (火锅) — a shared bubbling pot of spicy broth at the center of a table, into which diners dip raw ingredients and eat them as they cook. Jingzhong is one of the mid-range hotpot chains used for First Frost's family dinner sequences. If you see a scene with characters sitting around a table, red oil bubbling between them, talking while sweating — that's Chongqing hot pot, and likely Jingzhong or a visually similar venue.

The choice matters because hotpot is structurally different from Western sit-down dining. There is no individual plated meal. Everyone shares one heat source. Conversation happens across a pot of boiling chili oil, which means voices are louder, pauses are longer, and small choices — who reaches for which ingredient, who refills whose broth — carry dramatic weight. First Frost's writers leverage this. Family dinners in the drama are where emotional debts surface, precisely because hotpot gives everyone something to do with their hands while they say hard things.

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The Vertical Architecture — Why Streets Feel Stacked

Specific to Chongqing, and specific to First Frost's visual signature: many scenes show staircases descending at extreme angles, roads that pass over the tops of buildings, metro stations that emerge through apartment blocks, and residential complexes built directly into cliff faces. None of this is CGI. It's the actual city.

Chongqing's vertical architecture exists because the terrain gives architects no choice. A flat lot is a rarity. Buildings grow up the mountains and down into the valleys. Light Rail Line 2's Liziba Station is world-famous for running through floors 6 to 8 of a 19-story residential apartment tower — engineers designed the station and the tower together, so the train arrives at the 8th-floor platform and passes straight through the building.

For a drama like First Frost, which runs on characters moving between places that have emotional meaning, the vertical geography does narrative work automatically. Descending a staircase to reach someone feels weightier than walking across a flat courtyard. Wen Yifan and Sang Yan's apartment, their workplaces, the bar, her aunt's house — each exists at a different elevation in a way that wouldn't be possible in Beijing or Shanghai.

Visually, this also gives the drama its distinct Chongqing "feel": mist in the low areas, neon on the middle levels, sky peeking through between tower blocks. The cinematography leans hard into this. Shots that hold long on elevated walkways, on staircases wet with night rain, on characters silhouetted against distant high-rises — these are shot specifically because Chongqing offers them.

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Why Nanwu Is Fictional, But the Feeling Is Real

Zhu Yi invented Nanwu (along with Yihe and Beiyu) rather than setting First Frost in a specific real city. There is a craft reason for that. A novelist who sets a story in Shanghai or Beijing has to contend with readers who know those cities — who will fact-check the bus routes, the district names, the 2008-vs-2010 change in which coffee chain was dominant. A fictional city inherits aesthetic without historical argument.

But fictional doesn't mean unreal. First Frost's Nanwu works because Zhu Yi's readers recognize the type of city: a tier-1.5 or tier-2 urban center with mountain terrain, riverfront, post-industrial texture, mild weather, and a local food culture. Chongqing is exactly that city. When the drama filmed there, it wasn't choosing a backdrop. It was choosing the specific real texture that made Zhu Yi's fiction legible.

In Hidden Love, the same city — Nanwu — is soft. In First Frost, it's severe. That's not because the city changed. It's because the characters' emotional relationship to it changed. One city; two registers. Chongqing carries both.

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If You Want to Visit

Chongqing is accessible internationally via Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport (CKG). Direct flights from Los Angeles, Frankfurt, London, Singapore, Tokyo, and Seoul run regularly. The city's main drama-tourism itinerary, compiled by fan communities on Xiaohongshu (小红书) since First Frost's 2025 release, includes:

1. Hongya Cave (洪崖洞) — the iconic stacked-wooden-building waterfront
2. Liziba Station (李子坝轻轨站) — the train that passes through an apartment tower
3. Nanbin Road — the Yangtze waterfront used in First Frost's night scenes
4. C97 Cultural Park — "Overtime" bar exterior
5. Central Park (Yubei) — drama opening scenes
6. Beiyu Memory Noodles — the confession scene xiaomian shop
7. Eighteen Steps (十八梯) — the restored historic staircase district, aesthetic match for the drama's older-Chongqing sequences

The city is a major tourist destination on its own — First Frost has amplified existing tourism patterns, not created them from scratch — so infrastructure is strong. English signage is limited; download a translation app. Hotpot is non-negotiable.

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Watching First Frost is partly watching Chongqing perform Nanwu. Understanding that the city is real — that you could walk the same staircase Wen Yifan walks, eat xiaomian where Sang Yan orders noodles, stand on the Yangtze waterfront where they speak honestly — changes how the drama reads on a second viewing. The fiction is anchored. The feeling isn't invented from nothing. It was carried, frame by frame, from an actual city that has been teaching Chinese cinema how to look at emotional interiors for decades.

First Frost (难哄) is streaming globally on Netflix. Produced by Youku, directed by Qu Youning and others, premiered February 18, 2025.