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Director: Wang Wenjie
Starring: Cao Ying / Liu Jun / Yan Danchen / Wu Ma / Sun Feifei / Xu Shaoqiang
First aired: 2011
Plot Summary:
In Dongguan, the Yi family has long been renowned as the “King of Incense.” In bygone days, the Yi ancestors presented the finest incense to the imperial court. Faced with a shortage of funds, Emperor Daoguang issued a handwritten edict commending the Yi clan for their loyalty to the throne and granting them perpetual tax exemption. With several hundred thousand yuan worth of incense—its value in gold—the Yi family secured that single imperial decree. Once a locally esteemed clan known for its benevolence, virtue, and unwavering loyalty, the Yi household has since endured an unrelenting tide of turmoil ever since they took as a daughter-in-law a young woman whose very being seemed to radiate an exotic fragrance, named Mo Lan’er.
The son of the Guangdong provincial governor, repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to marry due to impotence, eventually set his sights on Mo Lan’er. Faced with the governor’s authority, the Mo family, though inwardly reluctant, could only stall—then swiftly arrange for their daughter to be wed through intermediaries. Mo Lan’er was given in marriage to Yi Cunpu, the son of Yi Tiannong, the “King of Wanxiang.” This infuriated the governor, who then colluded with the thuggish officer Zhang Zuo to dispatch him to Dongguan to harass Lan’er. When that proved futile, the governor exploited an unrelenting barrage of taxes and levies to drive the Yi family into bankruptcy, thereby forcing them to divorce Lan’er.When the local officials demanded taxes that were outrageously excessive, the Yi family simply ignored them. In response, the authorities arrested Yi Tiannong on charges of tax resistance and threw him into prison. On the day of the trial, the Yi clan produced an imperial edict personally issued by Emperor Daoguang, leaving everyone in the courtroom stunned. It turned out that the Yi family enjoyed a special exemption from taxation; moreover, for generations they had remained loyal to the court, not only paying their dues but also serving as a model taxpayer in the region. The Yi family’s appearance before the magistrate catapulted their reputation to new heights, while the provincial governor was left looking foolish—a humiliation that only deepened his resentment toward the Yi clan. Meanwhile, the Yi family was preparing to enter the agarwood trade with the Hong Kong merchant Deng Zehou.The provincial governor began to engineer opportunities to take revenge on the Yi family, while pocketing the profits himself. Under the emperor’s authority, he issued an edict announcing that the court would purchase sandalwood and prohibit its export or sale beyond the region. In reality, the governor was using these purchases to barter with the British trader, Colonel, for opium. The sandalwood farmers of Dongguan, knowing full well that the authorities never paid for the resin, refused to sell to the government and instead handed their harvest over to the Yi family. Upon learning of this, the authorities dispatched a large contingent of troops to arrest and kill Deng Zehou and confiscate all the sandalwood the Yi had amassed. The farmers clashed with the soldiers. Just as the officials were in the process of seizing the sandalwood, Lan’er and Yi Cunpu set fire to the warehouse where the government had secretly stockpiled opium. The troops immediately withdrew to put out the blaze. Meanwhile, the farmers swiftly loaded the sandalwood onto boats, enabling Deng Zehou to transport it away. Yi Tiannong was arrested.To save Yi Tiannong’s life, Lan’er and Yi Cunpu’s mother brought the Daoguang Emperor’s imperial edict to the capital to lodge a formal complaint. Overcome with emotion, Yi’s mother even produced the edict. Upon reading it, Empress Dowager Cixi immediately issued an order for Yi Tiannong’s secret execution. At the critical moment, Colonel Kold stepped in to intervene; his aim was to rescue Yi Cunpu so he could learn of the Yi family’s heirloom treasure—the Fragrant Gallbladder. He demanded that the Yi family present the Fragrant Gallbladder to the British Queen in exchange for British honorary citizenship—claiming that, with such a guarantee, no one in China would dare lay a finger on him. The Yi family refused Kold’s offer. In turn, Kold urged the provincial governor to have Yi Cunpu killed. But then the Japanese officer Tajima arrived once again to come to Yi Cunpu’s defense.Tian Dao believed that the reason Ku couldn’t obtain the Yi family’s incense pill was because he didn’t understand fragrance. Tian Dao, however, did—simply by approaching the pill, he could detect its scent. After rescuing Yi Cunpu, Tian Dao paid a visit to the Yi household under the pretext of competing in incense‑burning; during the ritual, he sprayed poison onto the incense, intending to incapacitate everyone in the family before stealing the pill. But the Yi clan had anticipated his scheme and all had taken an antidote, so his plot came to naught. Then the Sino-Japanese War broke out. Upon hearing that Admiral Deng Shichang was about to head to the battlefield, the Yi family once again took the lead in donating funds for national defense. Yet the war ended in defeat, and Admiral Deng fell in battle. To honor him, the Yi family funded the expansion of an incense garden, which they named “Shichang Garden.” The incense produced there was never harvested; it was kept solely as a memorial, meant to educate future generations.Fourteen years later, Empress Dowager Cixi issued an edict ordering the felling of a hundred fragrant trees, each as thick as a bowl, to be fashioned into sleeping beds. The imperial commissioner deemed that only the trees at Shichang Garden met the required dimensions and dispatched men to cut them down. The incense‑makers resisted. Had it not been for the Empress Dowager’s passing, the Yi family would have faced annihilation. When the War of Resistance broke out, the Japanese unleashed poison gas bombs to massacre anti‑Japanese guerrillas. Lan’er and Yi Cunpu were forced to burn the ancestral “fragrance gall” to purify the air. In the end, this saved the lives of the guerrilla fighters, and they emerged victorious from that battle.
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