The Protagonists: Hu Sanyuan and Hua Caixiang's Thirty-Year Love

Hu Sanyuan and Hua Caixiang were brought together through opera. He played the drums, she sang, and his rhythms supported her voice with a harmony that seemed made in heaven.

Though their lives were filled with hardship, Hu Sanyuan was wrongfully imprisoned, Hua Caixiang was trapped in a loveless marriage, and gossip followed them everywhere, they always kept each other in the deepest part of their hearts.

After enduring years of waiting and misunderstanding, fate finally gave them the warmest answer in their later years:

When Zhang Guangrong fell gravely ill, he willingly signed the divorce papers and entrusted Hua Caixiang to Hu Sanyuan;

Hu Sanyuan was exonerated, clearing his name after years of injustice.

Under the old locust tree in Jiuyangou, the two held a simple, heartwarming wedding. Xiao Hua reunited with her birth father, and the family was finally whole.

Hu Sanyuan was named an “Outstanding Bearer of Folk Culture,” while Hua Caixiang was invited to teach at an arts school, passing her skills on to the next generation.

Yi Qin'e returned to her hometown with her students to seek their roots. The torch of Qin opera was passed on, and a CCTV documentary recorded it all.

In their later years, the two stayed together in the mountains, sharing every morning and evening as drumbeats rose alongside cooking smoke.

Before his death, Hu Sanyuan passed his well-worn bamboo-root drumsticks to the next generation, urging them, “Take good care of the drums, and perform the opera well.”

A sapling sprouted from the drumsticks on the mountain behind their home. When the wind stirred its leaves, they rustled like endless drumbeats.

After a lifetime of waiting, they finally found their happy ending.

The drums remain, the opera remains, and so do the people!