Surrendering Freedom: The Capital’s Crown Prince Bows for Love

[Beijing elite circles + powerful family background + age gap + long-planned romance + sweet everyday life]

Gentle, devoted, husband-material heir to a top family business & cool-looking, headstrong college student

Chen Xie never expected the story of a wealthy heiress raised outside her birth family to become her own. Even more surprising, once her biological parents found her, they wanted to send her off to cozy up to a powerful man.

Guan Du came from a family of high-ranking officials. His father had given up politics for love and gone into business. After studying abroad, Guan Du founded a top investment firm single-handedly, then returned home in his early thirties to inherit the family business. Rumor had it he was noble, reserved, and impossible to approach, yet only Chen Xie ever saw his gentle side.

He said his family was pressuring him to marry too, so they agreed to pretend to be a couple and get their families off their backs.

The spectators took their act for the real thing, and the actors fell deeply in love. Beside the nameless lake at Peking University, she told him, “Guan Du, I really like you.”

A year later, she boarded a flight to England without looking back. A friend asked whether he wanted to stop her. A glimmer of tears flashed in Guan Du's eyes, but he signaled that there was no need.

Yet in the dead of night, he flew alone to London.

But she said, “Boss Guan, your name doesn't suit you. Guan Du, Guan Du: in the end, even the mountains stand between us.”

Only after an old, faded photograph was restored did Chen Xie understand that it had all been real.

What Guan Du had never forgotten were those eyes, like a Berlin winter...