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Tang Fan likes to eat. Sui Zhou likes to cook. Together, they solve crimes.
That's it. That's the show 'Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty'


Tang Fan is a minor government official at the Shuntian prefecture in the capital of the Ming empire (today's Beijing), and as he prefers eating to working, his salary usually runs out after two weeks just for rent and food (at restaurants, because he, despite being an expert on food preparation, can't cook to save his life), so he supplements his income by anonymously writing steamy romances. His best friend is a doctor called Pei Huai who's into all the newest things (tomatoes, autopsies, science etc.) whom he met a few years ago while helping in the aftermath of a disaster. He is very clever (he would have taken first place in his year at the central examinations, but was bumped down for political reasons), and when his boss does catch hold of him, he can do all their work simultaneously i nan afternoon and still be on time for dinner at his favourite restaurant, Auntie Dong's.

And then, everything changes when he meets Sui Zhou, an imperial guard and former soldier from a noble family, while working on the same case. He's got some severe PTSD and likes to cook, which he does to Tang Fan's exacting standards. As he lives by himself in a huge house with several courtyards, Tang Fan is happy to move in with his huge number of books and the teenage girl Dong'er whom he saved from indentured servitude (and worse) at the hands of his former landlady, a goat, and a collection of friends and family that come trailing after him and even live with them for a while, among them:

- Wang Zhi, a very high-ranking young imperial eunuch who heads what's basically the secret police
- Tang Yu and her son Cheng'er, Tang Fan's older sister and little nephew, who move in with them after she divorces her heartless and greedy husband
- Duo'erla, a princess from the tribe of Mid-Asian Steppe Barbarians known as Oirats, and her faithful sidekick Wuyun Bolage, a massively strong carriage builder

as well as an ever-changing collection of friends, colleagues and maybe-adversaries all welcome at their dinner table at one time or another.

As a person, Tang Fan is quite gluttonous, a bit greedy (but absolutely incorruptible), demanding, whiny, oblivious to the feelings of others, and quite childish at times; but he is also very intelligent and capable, loyal to his friends, family and job, and would risk everything for the people he loves (mainly Dong'er and Sui Zhou, but also his sister and nephew, and Duo'erla). Left to his own devices, Tang Fan will always default to eating and writing smut.

All this feels very modern and extremely relatable, but is actually set in 1478 (yes, the tomatoes are a tad early, and the martial arts are a tad magical and the clockpunk flying machine is a tad unhistorical); the original name of the show (and the book it is based on) is even 'Chenghua Year 14'. In the book, Tang Fan and Sui Zhou are lovers, but as this is a live action adaptation from mainland China, the romance is toned down (as in 'The Untamed') to bromance for censorship reasons. I am really uneasy with matter-of-factly accepting the realities of Chinese censorship simply because I love some media that are produced despite it, but this is what I have to work with.

As far as I-the-RPer am concerned, Tang Fan and Sui Zhou are of course lovers, as in the book; they bicker a lot and boss each other around, but at the end of the day, they love each other very much and see themselves as a family, with Dong'er as their daughter. However, I think that Tang Fan is very unlikely to talk about that in so many words; if he talks about Sui Zhou, he will mostly mention how good his cooking, how excellent his fighting skill and how annoying his grumpy personality is.


Tang Fan is from 'Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty' / 'Chenghua 14', and is the property of Xi Mengshi, Jackie Chan, and iQIYI. He appears here solely for the purpose of role-playing in milliways_bar, from which no profit whatsoever is being made. The mun behind the curtain is yakalskovich