Title: Chen Ergou’s Demonic Life

Director: Huang Kai

Starring: Wang Ziyun, Zhao Bingrui, Liu Bo, Zhu Hanyan, Ma Yi, Yu Silu, Guo Jianuo

First broadcast date: October 10, 2016

Plot Summary:

The audacious life of a cunning peasant. An elderly man, clad in tattered clothes, crouched on a birchwood stool before his dilapidated house, sipping homemade baijiu and puffing on an intensely pungent “green toad” tobacco pipe. Squinting, he gazed at the setting sun about to dip behind the Changbai Mountains, then turned to a little boy of six or seven who was playing with two local mongrel dogs—one black, one white—and said, “Fusheng, the beast that even the Northeast tiger fears most isn’t the thick-skinned, tough-as-iron black bear, nor the six-hundred‑jin wild boar king; it’s the mountain‑guarding dog that has taken to the hills.”
Many years later, the old man lay within an unassuming burial mound. The child who had neither been frozen to death by the snowstorm nor scorned and reviled by the villagers of Zhangjiazhai—whose very spine had been pierced by their cold, judgmental stares—had at last left the mountains and come to the city, like a mad dog that had once roamed the hills, having bitten, knelt, and bowed in submission, and thus earned his glory. His grandfather, like an ancient tortoise, died nameless; his elder brother, like a hungry hawk, soared and battled across the northern skies; his father, like a gaunt tiger, stood facing the eastern cliffs. As for him—nicknamed “Chen Erdog”—through his own two hands he endured life’s ups and downs, its hardships and trials, forged a band of quirky, eccentric companions, and ultimately reached the pinnacle of his journey.