Guarding the Velvet Flowers: Mr. Gu's Intangible Heritage Betrothal

In Shanghai in 2025, amid a wave of renewed enthusiasm for traditional Chinese culture, Su Wanyi, an inheritor of the intangible cultural heritage of velvet-flower making, is fired after exposing her former employer for plagiarizing the craft. But while rescuing an antique velvet-flower headdress at an antiques market, she encounters Gu Chengyan, a rising tech magnate. His century-old family business, Jishitang, is under the covetous eye of foreign investors and urgently needs to revitalize its brand with the help of intangible cultural heritage. To restore her master’s final work, A Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix, Su Wanyi signs a “one-year marriage contract.” Under the guise of a business alliance, she and Gu Chengyan launch the “Intangible Heritage Renewal Initiative” together.

One is a meticulous craftswoman, gentle on the outside but strong within, whose fingertips bear the marks of velvet threads and whose silk can recreate the grace of a hundred birds. The other is a rational, reserved AI company founder who wears an ancestral jade thumb ring on his left hand and hopes to use technology to fulfill his mother’s uncompleted wish. His mother was an inheritor of intangible cultural heritage who wanted to “make traditional crafts visible to the world.” As their “velvet flowers × smart wearables” collaboration takes Paris Fashion Week by storm, they reproduce an ancient formula to prove their innocence, and they fight back against foreign investors’ “fake intangible heritage” scheme, the two move from testing the waters and tugging at each other in their contract marriage, with breakfast porridge and stress-relieving velvet-flower ornaments, to choosing each other after revealing their pasts on a rainy night. Together, they empower handmade crafts with an “AI Pattern Generator” and fight back against a capital-led crackdown with the “Craftsmanship Protection Alliance.”