Blossoms Shanghai in Shanghainese: the dialect version

繁花 was shot in Shanghainese and released in Shanghainese and Mandarin on the same night. For a language that had been kept off television by rule for fifteen years, that was an event — and it is still the best hour of Shanghainese a learner can listen to.

Updated 19 September 2026 · 4 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Shanghainese examples play the recordings from Verbavia’s course, made with a Shanghainese voice; Mandarin examples play a Mandarin voice.

The series

Blossoms Shanghai (繁花) is Wong Kar-wai’s first television series: thirty episodes, set in the Shanghai of the early 1990s, starring Hu Ge as A Bao, with Ma Yili, Tang Yan and Xin Zhilei. It premiered on CCTV-8 and Tencent Video on 27 December 2023 and ran to 9 January 2024. It is adapted from Jin Yucheng’s novel of the same name, serialised in 2012, published as a book in 2013, and awarded the Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2015 — a novel itself written in a Shanghainese-inflected Chinese, in which the phrase 不响, says nothing, recurs well over a thousand times.

Two versions, from the same actors

The series was filmed in Shanghainese. Guangming Daily reported that almost all the cast and crew spoke it and that the director’s own Shanghainese was good, so that “the set was like a big Shanghainese classroom”; each actor then recorded a Mandarin version of their own lines. So the two versions are not an original and a dub in the usual sense — both are the actors’ own voices — but the Shanghainese is the performance that was given on set, and the Mandarin is the one made afterwards.

The Paper’s viewing guide, published on the first night, set out who showed which:

That a national broadcaster aired a drama in a regional language at all was the news. Sixth Tone quotes the 2009 regulation that the language of television dramas “should primarily be in Mandarin”; the Shanghainese Blossoms ran on CCTV regardless.

Where to watch it now

• China: Tencent Video carries both audio versions.
• North America: the Criterion Channel acquired the rights and premiered the series on 24 November 2025.
• France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Benelux, Latin America, Turkey and India: Mubi holds the streaming rights.
• Elsewhere: Tencent’s international app WeTV lists all thirty episodes.

Which audio track each international service carries is the thing to check before you subscribe. I could not confirm from any of their pages whether Criterion, Mubi or WeTV offer the Shanghainese audio or only the Mandarin. If the page lets you choose a language, choose 沪语; if it does not, listen to the first line — 侬 non ‘you’ and 伊 yi ‘he, she’ will tell you within seconds which you have, as the pronouns page explains.

What the Shanghainese in it is like

It is real, and it is not uniform. The dialectologist Qian Nairong, asked by the Huaxi Metropolis Daily, said the show’s Shanghainese “passed”, had a period feel, and was more distinctive than the Shanghainese in B for Busy; he also pointed out that You Benchang’s older character speaks like the older generation and Hu Ge’s like a young man in a 1990s Shanghai shopping mall. A column in The Paper made the same observation about the whole cast — the Shanghainese of 爷叔, 宝总, 玲子 and 汪小姐 “differ from one another on close listening” — and asked for tolerance rather than a standard. Sixth Tone quotes the dialect specialist Ding Dimeng noting that the older actors speak slowly, “reminiscent of Shanghainese opera”, and the younger ones fast.

For a learner that variety is the point. The course teaches one accent; the series gives you three generations of the city in one room, and the page on the language’s decline explains why the young ones sound closer to Mandarin.

The words that went round the city

• 勿响 veh shian ‘says nothing; keeps quiet’ — the novel’s 不响 in its Shanghainese form, and the word everyone quoted. 响 shian ‘to make a sound’ is the verb; the silence is the character trait.
• 爷叔 ya soh ‘uncle; the older mentor’ — the title of You Benchang’s character, and the ordinary Shanghainese word for a man of your father’s generation.
• 阿宝 a pau ‘A Bao’ — Hu Ge’s character, whose promotion to 宝总, Boss Bao, is the story.
• 腔调 chian diau ‘style, class’ — Xinmin Weekly notes that the young characters use it as praise, 侬个腔调覅忒好噢, while older speakers remember it as a criticism.
• 排骨年糕 ba kueh nyie kau ‘pork chop with rice cake’ — the Shanghai snack the series made a run on: Meituan told the Labour Daily that searches rose 937 percent and delivery orders tripled in a week.

The places are real too, mostly. Tencent News traced 至真园 to the Taishengyuan restaurant at the corner of Huanghe Road, open since 1993; the same piece notes that 夜东京 never existed on Jinxian Road and is a name the character Lingzi gave her restaurant in the story.

Did it revive the language?

It revived attention. Sixth Tone reported in January 2024 that thousands of people had posted videos on Xiaohongshu of themselves learning Shanghainese from the show; a 25-year-old told them “it has been a long time since I saw a show in Shanghainese”. An AFP report the same month found a Shanghainese tutor whose students were “mainly foreigners” hoping more shows would follow, and quoted Qian Nairong on the “crisis of inheritance” that followed the 1992 ban on the language in schools. SCMP’s letters page called it a rare drama “aired in two versions” and said it was “breathing new life into the dialect”.

Whether attention became speakers is another question, and one nobody has measured. The honest position is that a hit series in a regional language is a good year for that language and not a trend. Two years on, what it has certainly left behind is thirty hours of well-recorded, subtitled, natural Shanghainese from three generations of speakers — which, for a learner, is the rarest thing there is. How to use it, and what else there is to watch and hear, is on the screen and song page.

Sources

1. Wikipedia: Blossoms Shanghai — premiere 27 December 2023 on CCTV-8 and Tencent Video; cast; Criterion Channel (North America, 24 November 2025); Mubi territories
2. Wikipedia: Jin Yucheng — the novel, 2012, Mao Dun Literature Prize 2015
3. The Paper, 27 December 2023 — the broadcast schedule of the Mandarin and Shanghainese versions
4. Guangming Daily, 28 December 2023 — filmed in Shanghainese, “the set was like a big Shanghainese classroom”; ratings
5. Sixth Tone, 10 January 2024: Shanghai on Screen: A Hit TV Show Helps a City Find Its Voice
6. SCMP Letters, 21 January 2024: Wong Kar-wai’s Blossoms Shanghai is a kiss of life for a declining dialect
7. AFP via Latin Times, 16 January 2024: Hit Chinese TV series rekindles sidelined Shanghainese dialect
8. Huaxi Metropolis Daily, 9 January 2024 — Qian Nairong on the show’s Shanghainese
9. The Paper, 申知沪志, 11 January 2024 — the cast’s Shanghainese differs on close listening
10. Xinmin Weekly, 21 February 2024 — 腔调 as praise among the young
11. Chengdu Business Daily, 2 January 2024 — 不响 appears over 1,300 times in the novel
12. Tencent News, 9 January 2024 — the real 至真园 and the fictional 夜东京
13. Labour Daily, 28 January 2024 — 排骨年糕 searches up 937% on Meituan
14. WeTV: Blossoms Shanghai