Series

Xia Qing has a Spanish degree and twenty-seven failed interviews. Then a sock seller in Yiwu's giant market hires her to talk to his Mexican buyer. Twenty working days of prices, samples, contracts, toasts and one very expensive mistake.

The Jilin City evening paper will print its last edition on 31 December. In its final year, young reporter Luo Bing finds handwritten letters signed 'Lao Xue' that have arrived every week for forty years -- and follows them to the person, and the story, behind them.

Seventeen-year-old street dancer Cheng Yinuo fails her dance exam and is sent for the summer to a struggling Beijing opera troupe in a hutong -- run by her late grandfather's old stage partner, who hasn't said his name in thirty years.

Wild elephants eat her grandfather's corn the morning Yu Xiang comes home to Xishuangbanna. She joins the elephant early-warning team -- drones at night, a newborn calf, a midnight rescue -- while her grandfather swears the elephants have to go.

Junior lawyer Wen Jing is handed a free case nobody wants: a hundred-year-old Chengdu teahouse ordered out for a hotel. Then she finds out who the developer is -- her own firm's biggest client.

Hao Dashan grows peonies outside Luoyang and has never left Henan. His daughter wants him at her master's graduation in Munich. Passport, visa, refusal, a second try, a missed connection in Frankfurt -- and a German boyfriend he wasn't expecting.

For her sixtieth birthday, Song Zihang's mother wants one present: twenty blind dates before Spring Festival. The shy Changchun car-seat designer gets through them with help from the matchmaking agency's sharp-tongued photographer.

A former top tennis player with a ruined knee now coaches rich kids at a Haikou resort -- until he sees a barefoot fisherman's daughter hitting balls against the sea wall with a wooden board.

Laid off in Shanghai, Ma Lan goes home to the goji fields of Ningxia, props up her phone and starts selling her family's berries live -- to seven viewers, then ten, then ten thousand orders and a middleman who wants her gone.

A Beijing grad student who restores paintings by computer is sent to the Dunhuang caves for a year, where an old master won't let her touch a wall for three months.

A seventy-two-year-old Kaifeng widow who sold soup dumplings for thirty years joins a seniors' writing class, learns pinyin, and starts a novel about a dumpling girl in the Qingming scroll.

An old Quanzhou locksmith catches a hungry teenager picking the lock of his own shop -- and gives him a bowl of noodles, a job and three rules.

After failing the civil service exam twice, a young Tujia woman becomes a tour guide in the stone forests of Zhangjiajie -- for a company that pays guides only in shopping commissions.

A Sydney girl who has nearly forgotten her Chinese inherits her grandfather's cracked blue-and-white bowl -- and goes to Jingdezhen to find the person who painted the fish inside it.

A Zhuhai Chinese teacher with twenty-eight years and a red pen is given a robot assistant that knows everything -- and the one silent boy in her class starts talking to it at lunchtime.

Wen Di studied literature and has failed thirty interviews when a six-person start-up in a Shenzhen urban village hires her to do one thing: listen to old people. Twenty everyday workplace situations -- a contract, meetings, a formal email, a hospital that won't answer, a pitch that fails, unpaid wages, a better offer -- and Grandma Feng, who just wants her phone to understand her.

Shu Ya grew up in Shanghai and can't understand a word her Wenzhou grandmother says. A linguistics PhD student, she goes back to the village on the Nanxi River to record its dialect before the last speakers are gone: a boatman's river words, a wedding song only three women remember, a typhoon night, a talking dictionary -- and the day she answers her grandmother in her grandmother's own language.

Nine years after losing to a computer on national TV, former Go champion Bai Song teaches children above a Hangzhou teahouse. Then a nine-year-old girl who barely speaks and can't bear noise plays the most surprising Go he has seen in years. Twenty chapters: demanding parents, an old rival with an AI academy, a quiet room, a dying teacher, and the day Bai Song finally sits down with the machine.

Meng Yun, a tea farmer's daughter from near Pu'er, becomes an attendant on the Lancang, the express that runs from Kunming across the border to Vientiane. Her Lao partner Khamti does everything her own way, and Manager Zhou never lets a rule slide. Twenty chapters: a lost passport, a boy travelling alone, the rainy season, a viral video, the water festival, a mother who falls ill, and Manager Zhou's last trip.

Chengdu chef Bai Yang has lost his restaurant and his marriage. So he signs up to cook for the eighteen people spending a year at Zhongshan Station in Antarctica: one delivery of food, eighteen hometowns, and two months of darkness. Twenty chapters: the last fresh cabbage, bean sprouts in a basin, a homesick mechanic, a blizzard, a missed birthday, Midwinter, a hotpot on the ice, and the last dinner.