The village of Aqiap, nestled at the foot of a snow-capped mountain, is a natural settlement formed by the Kazakhs as they transitioned from a nomadic life of following water and grass to a sedentary one. For a hundred years, the community has lived here, holding weddings and funerals, multiplying and enduring, leading a relatively closed and carefree existence.
It is 136 kilometers from the nearest county seat, and to this day, the road has not been fully extended to the foot of the village. Many stretches are still only hard gravel foundations, and even off-road vehicles can feel the harsh jolting as they traverse them. What’s more, the road winds and twists, rising and falling across the vast wilderness, crossing five mountain ridges before finally reaching its end.
When Li Shan was shooting his wuxia epic Seeing Green Mountains in his early years, he spent a full four months exploring Xinjiang. During those four months, he took his screenwriter Shen Ling and art director Tennessee across mountains and valleys, soaking in the local customs and landscapes, traveling from the Pamir Plateau to the Taklamakan Desert, and then on to the foot of the Tianshan Mountains and deep into Kanas – it was then that Aqiap first entered the blueprint of his story.
It was too remote. After the crew arrived – haphazardly, with three large trucks, eight box vans, one bus, and four SUVs – dozens of people spilled out all at once, dropping to their knees in the snow and throwing up as if the world were ending.
Zhuang Tiwen had never endured such hardship. Between bouts of vomiting, she gave Li Shan a thumbs-up and said, “Director Li, you’re really something else…”
Dressed in a down-lined outdoor jacket, Li Shan unscrewed the lid of his thermos with an air of calculated calm and said, “With heavy snow sealing off the mountains, the road is bound to be a bit rougher.”
Tiwen was cursing him in her heart. When she’d first done the investment assessment for this project, she’d known it would be a tough shoot, and had even secretly been pleased – thinking they’d save money by staying with the locals and eating their food. She never imagined reality would be this brutal; just getting into the mountains alone had left her dizzy, disoriented, and unable to tell up from down.
They’d set out from the county seat at eight in the morning and didn’t arrive until past three in the afternoon. But there was a two-hour time difference from Beijing time, so by their internal body clocks it was roughly one-thirty local time – the middle of the afternoon.
The sunlight beat down on the snow, creating a harsh glare. The village, buried under the heavy white blanket, had been perfectly silent until the crew’s arrival stirred it into noisy life.
The village chief, the Party branch secretary, the health worker, and three or four Kazakh youths who plainly looked honest and hardworking came out to receive them. As the nominal executive producer, Zhuang Tiwen, along with production manager Luo Siliang, acted as representatives to coordinate with them, and according to the pre-arranged plan, saw to the accommodation assignments for each department.
By Kazakh custom, winter would normally mean moving to winter pastures for shelter. But Aqiap was uniquely situated – nestled in a wide river valley, surrounded by mountains on all sides, with vast, rolling grasslands. So when winter came, they didn’t need to pack up their belongings, drive their sheep, or lead their horses to new grounds. They only needed to stack hay, reinforce their houses, and smoke their horsemeat, and they could ride out the winter in safety.
After Tiwen had sorted out all the arrangements, she accompanied Ying Yin to her lodging. Junyi was struggling to drag a 24-inch suitcase, while two crew workers followed behind, each carrying a 28-inch suitcase on their shoulders.
“To be honest, I’m worried about you.”
The snow seemed to swallow all sound; the only thing accompanying them was the crunch-crunch of boots stepping through snow. Zhuang Tiwen’s concerned words sounded lonely and thin in this vast wilderness.
“You underestimate me.” Ying Yin kept her hands tucked into her sleeves, carefully taking in this pristine white world. “Just think of it as shooting a scene – and now it’s time to move on.”
She had little experience with unrequited love, but plenty of experience with moving on from roles. It was painful, yes, but if she told herself that everything was meant to end anyway, and that now was simply the time for it, then it didn’t feel so hard to bear.
But as she walked along, taking in this world draped in silver, something must have crossed her mind. She stopped and looked into the distance, then said to Tiwen, “It’s really beautiful here.”
Tiwen raised her phone and took a photo, then sent it to Shang Shao on Ying Yin’s behalf.
The village houses of Aqiap were scattered along the river. After trudging quietly for more than ten minutes, they finally arrived at the lodging assigned to Ying Yin.
It was a log cabin built of pine and spruce, with mud packed between the logs to seal the gaps. The pyramidal tiled roof was layered with dried hay for insulation and wind protection.
Under these shooting conditions, even a big star had little room to be picky – and given Li Shan’s status, wasn’t he staying in the same kind of place? Once inside, the stove was already lit. Along the wall, a long kang – a heated sleeping platform – ran from east to west, built of wooden planks with a mattress of medium thickness on top, covered by a layer of stiff felt and then a gold-embroidered blanket.
Against the wall, brightly colored quilts in red and green were folded into long stacks, with pillows piled on top – they would only be spread out when it was time to sleep at night.
“This is one of the few houses in the village with a flush toilet. You’ll make do.” Tiwen explained everything clearly, no longer acting like the pampered heiress she once was, and instead tried to reassure Ying Yin. “You can change the duvet cover yourself later. The only real problem is the cold – with just this stove, mornings are going to be rough.”
Just as she finished speaking, a crew worker knocked on the door from outside. “Junyi, here’s the oil heater for you.”
Junyi acknowledged it, took it, and efficiently plugged it in.
“What’s that?” Tiwen asked.
“An oil-filled radiator – electric heating panels.” Junyi answered matter-of-factly. “She gets cold easily. Even with this, it might not be enough.”
It really wasn’t enough. The first night, Ying Yin was jolted awake by the cold. Junyi and Tiwen were fast asleep beside her, but she alone lay restless.
She had already put on thermal underwear, thick socks over her feet, and stuck heat packs on her back and stomach – yet even so, she was still so cold it gave her a headache.
The pillow was one she’d brought from home, familiar under her head. As she tossed and turned, she thought of the few nights Shang Shao had stayed over.
How silly – she’d bought a pair of pillows, but always used one herself while Junyi used the other. Every time he came, it was so sudden, always in the dead of night, and she couldn’t be bothered to rummage through the closet for a new one, so they’d share her pillow. But she never really used it anyway, because she’d always rest her head on his arm, in his embrace.
The pillow had been washed and dried so many times that his scent had long faded.
Outside, the temperature must have been minus ten or more. Her toes inside the cashmere socks felt like they were about to freeze off. Ying Yin lay on her side, curled up, wrapping her palms over the tips of her feet. That winter in Germany, when she’d gotten off the plane and into the car, she’d shivered just like this from the cold – and back then, he’d held her frozen feet against his chest without a second thought, without caring if it was beneath him.
Above her, the small window was set into the ceiling, covered in a thick layer of condensation, like tracing paper against the deep blue night outside. Ying Yin’s sharpened chin peeked out from under the covers as she gazed at that window, her eyes fixed on it without blinking for a long time. After a while, tears slipped from her aching eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
She was too delicate, she knew she shouldn’t be, but she wanted him to feel sorry for her.
Perhaps it was the extreme cold that kept her awake all night – yet when morning came, her face surprisingly showed no signs of puffiness at all.
According to Li Shan’s production practice, before filming began, all actors were required to do a script read-through. Screenwriter Shen Ling was also present – he needed to help the actors find the characters’ intentions, emotions, and the underlying events hidden beneath the text.
A good novelist might become a good screenwriter, but a good screenwriter is certainly not a successful novelist – because film belongs to the director as a comprehensive visual art. Performance, story, framing, staging, and production design are, in essence, nothing more than building blocks in the director’s hands, to be arranged and commanded at his will.
Li Shan was a master of mise-en-scène. The space within the frame – from the grand elements like composition, shot scale, and camera relationships, down to the smallest detail like the placement of a prop mirror – was all part of his expressive toolkit. Such a director inevitably speaks through images, not through text.
Shen Ling was the screenwriter Li Shan found most effective, because his creative style aligned perfectly with Li Shan’s.
Read on its own, Shen Ling’s script had very little readability – just line after line of dialogue and the simplest scene descriptions, with hardly any literary embellishment, let alone the inner turmoil of the characters.
Only those with the most sensitive intuition could shed tears just from reading his script.
In their first meeting at the teahouse, Ying Yin’s engagement with the script – her reading, her immersion, her micro-expressions – had been the perfect audition.
Most actors, when handed Shen Ling’s outline, character bios, and script, were utterly lost, as if thrown onto a vast, snow-covered plain with nothing but white space everywhere. What circle were they supposed to draw? They had no idea.
Paradoxically, Li Shan was a director who demanded extremely high precision in performance – like asking a skilled cook to make a meal without ingredients. Therefore, to accurately grasp the essence of the characters, such a read-through was essential. The actors would hear the most direct supplementary interpretations from both the director and the screenwriter.
The read-through was held in a separate small log cabin, which had been rearranged to serve as a temporary director’s workspace. Ying Yin was never late for work, so she set out early.
Fresh snow covered the path, with only deep hoof prints marking the way. When she walked in, clutching her thermos and hot water bottle, there was indeed only one person there.
He was very tall, with broad shoulders and a wide back as seen from behind, dressed no differently from the local herdsmen – meaning, in a thin black cotton jacket, dark blue jeans, and brown work boots, making one wonder if he wasn’t standing in a sub-zero, snowy world, but in spring.
However, the local young men were used to hunching their shoulders, all with their shoulders raised high and hands stuffed in their pockets. His posture, by contrast, was very relaxed, as he stood with both hands warming over the stove.
Hearing footsteps, he looked up toward the lifted quilted door curtain.
“The wind’s getting in,” he said.
Ying Yin paused for a moment, then realized what he meant. She stepped forward into the room and let go of the curtain, which fell heavily back into place, blocking out the wind and snow outside.
“My name is Jiang Te,” he introduced himself, stepping back from the stove. “You look very cold. Come warm yourself by the fire.”
Hearing his name, Ying Yin wasn’t particularly surprised. There was a cinematic quality about him that set him apart from this rough, impoverished world.
Jiang Te was a complete newcomer with no acting experience whatsoever, and no one in the entire crew knew where he’d come from. Ever since When Snow Melts It Turns Green was officially announced, countless people had tried to dig up his background – some even rumored that his family was immensely wealthy and well-connected. But the moment Ying Yin laid eyes on him, she knew those claims were false.
He didn’t carry that air of refined privilege, nor did he have the easygoing looseness of the wealthy. Instead, he radiated a keen wariness and a sense of closure. He seemed like someone who could strike at any moment – but before that, if you didn’t provoke him, he wouldn’t take an interest in you.
With just one look, Ying Yin understood that he was exactly like the male lead in the story, Ha Ying.
“Director Li and the others aren’t here yet?” She held her hot water bottle, eyes lowered as she stood in front of the stove.
It was obvious that she felt somewhat ill at ease – not just because she was alone with a strange man, but because of the way Jiang Te looked at her. So direct, so probing, like a sword piercing through the social distance between them.
“Maybe still on the way.” Jiang Te kept his eyes on her and asked persistently, “You haven’t introduced yourself to me yet.”
“You don’t recognize me?” Ying Yin found it both amusing and absurd, and under his penetrating gaze, she tried hard to appear casual.
Her smile was faint, but it was enough to light up the world. Jiang Te’s gaze didn’t waver. “I do recognize you. But even when you know someone, a proper introduction is still the right place to start.”
For a moment, Ying Yin felt as if she’d been frozen in place.
Shang Shao had said something very similar to her before.
He, too, had pretended not to know her when they met, patiently waiting for a formal introduction.
