Hello dear followers of the eternal Siji Manor saga! I submit this humble set imagining to you with the hope that it meets your expectations.
This print came together a year or so ago as a culmination of my years of studying Hengdian sets across popular dramas, and my own attempt to expand my artistic abilities into multiple fields following my own headcanons for the protagonists of Word of Honor/Shān Hé Lìng.
Unfortunately, after putting it up in my shop I promptly collapsed into a heap about it, and couldn't do the promotions for it because life got heavier than the things I was already asking my art to carry for me.
I still have dreams to develop a proper indie artbook about the set design and narrative for the show, and I have more set schematics detailing far more of the sets used and ideas about how the sets would come together - but I think I may have to stop here and acknowledge that it's too much for one person for the time being.
(If anyone is willing to reach out and hear my vision and help me produce some kind of one-off zine for it, please do get in touch. Otherwise,)
Thank you for your years of interest and support. I am, enthusiastically but quite tiredly, forever a fan of dramas putting their protagonists in situations I can build headcanons about and turn into cultural and architectural deep dives through mapping a little place important to big characters.
Let's continue to build community in the places we can.
Only another year later 😅This has truly been a marathon of a project and 2025 has thrown me a lot of life challenges, so I am truly thankful for everyone's support. I won't lie, I am here to rattle my tin can and point you all towards my kofi page, because ya girl is struggling. BUT I'm also pleased to announce I am finally ✨almost✨ finished!!
Along with the previews seen here in my last update, I can now also tease the completed elevations of Siji's main hall and main gate:
All that remains is one final building! Then I get to try and figure out how to put it all together in one final piece and get it print ready.
After this behemoth is completed, I'll be continuing to produce marker art of the beautiful Siji buildings and landscapes, bringing to life a more colourful vision of what Four Seasons Manor could look like based on research of the wider sets. I am currently in the process of finalising a first piece, a birdseye view of the full manor, which I will create a post about as soon as I get it set up in my shop.
As always, thank you for your continued support and enthusiasm 💛 Find my art and more projects at the links below, and please consider donating to help me out.
Cannot express to you all how badly I want to do an update on Siji Manor now I've finished the ink map, and how much I want to knuckle down and just overall finish the project. But life has been kicking my ass for the better part of a year now and stalled a lot of my creative commitments. Despite that I just wanted to hop in here and thank you all for your support and continued interest in my obsession with building the WOH boys their happy au dream house (accurate to the show of course), and to let you know progress is still slowly but surely being made. Thanks especially to my mutuals who keep encouraging me, and let me randomly message them out of the blue with new location headcanons no matter how long it's been. ily 💛
What's this?! A drafting update?! Yes! Only a year after the first one 😂
I admit I did fall down a massive rabbit hole with the set sleuthing, but I felt I just couldn't move on without solving the mystery of the two sets' layouts. Links to that three-part saga here:
Part One | Part Two | Part Three
With that mystery solved and the layout plans all set, I can finally bring you some previews for my drafting project as a whole!
Recognise anything? 👀
I'm aware that no one likes reading walls of text (I say while producing nothing but lengthy text posts like it's its own art form). So, for more info on how this draft will take shape as a final piece, follow the cut below.
Please also considering supporting me by reblogging my art and research posts, donating to my kofi, or buying one of my prints 🙏✨
Further artist links can be found in my pinned post (project list).
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So, if you're one of the crazy people who actually read through the previous set sleuthing in its entirety, first of all I love you. Second of all, you will be aware of the artistic dilemma I posited at the end of the layout updates:
How can I merge these two very different sets together? Should I merge them together?
Do I present an architecture draft that is simply reportage - showing both sets, and summarizing their different uses in the show, or do I draft the Four Seasons Manor I see emerging in the crossover of these two sets - the one I can feel starting to take shape in my brain?
I have decided to do both! 😃🤡
This piece will follow the draftsman style of my previous set design projects, and include buildings from both sets - but only as much as we are presented with on-screen, rather than the wider film set.
This is because, at its heart, my drafts are a way to better understand the locations that are presented to us by the show - a further way to enrich the scenes by understanding the space they are set within, and as an exploration of any cultural cues that I for one, as a Westerner, may not spot a lot of the time.
What kept bugging me, though, was that my fantasy world-building brain was not satisfied - I could not envision a whole, cohesive location for Four Seasons Manor because I kept noticing the switch from one set to the next. (Location spotting in cdramas has now become somewhat of a party trick for me 😂 The fourth wall has been broken.)
Now, I have not written fic in a long time, as the posting dates in my hanwenzhou tag can attest to, but we all know the persistence of the blorbo brainrot. I wanted to be able to imagine a place for all my happy wenzhou family, rebuilt Siji aus!!
So, going forward, I will be producing some more art that marries the two sets together and I can present as my interpretation of a full, rebuilt Four Seasons Manor in bloom - drawing on much of the set designs I have seen through my research, and my own personal headcanons.
I'm not sure how I want to do this yet, but I may start out using Siji to practice my marker art skills. So expect it to look a little like these pieces from my previous projects:
And, of course, the birdseye view of the Siji set at the beginning of this post.
I'm excited to begin!
That said, once the Four Seasons Manor draft is done, I also want to return to my CQL project and continue drafting the major sects. I better get moving 😂
Thank you for your support and encouragement, as always 💛
Four Seasons Manor (四季山庄): Set Layout, Part Three!
This is the third and final post detailing my set sleuthing adventure, looking for the sets that make up Word of Honor's Siji Manor. If you're stumbling over this post in the wild - hi! I draw architectural drafts of cdrama sets, as accurately to the show as I can. A huge amount of research goes into creating my art, and so far no set location has been as elusive as this one.
Split across two sets - one located in Hengdian World Studio's Spring and Autumn Tang Park, and the other in Hengdian's Huaxia film studio - this post is the final part uncovering the layout of Siji Manor. (And nothing will make sense if you read this post first, go back to part one and part two!!)
A reminder, before we dive right back into the breakdown of my completed birdseye view, that this last part will cover the main courtyard of what I have dubbed the "interior" Siji set, highlighted in red below:
Let's dive in!
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The Main Courtyard
The main hall (6), the largest building in this set, is what I and @minnarr, who shares my brainrot 🙏 and has been a great help in this process, have been calling "Everlasting."
This is because sign over the entrance reads, "萬古長青" (wàn gǔ cháng qīng), which to my layman's knowledge translates as "Everlasting and Evergreen," an idiom that can be extrapolated to mean "forever green throughout the ages," which describes a noble spirit or deep friendship that will last forever, like an eternal Springtime:
In the above screenshots, you can see that Chengling's training area (9) is set up in front of this main hall, and over his head in the third picture, you can just about see the moon window that is a feature of WKX's room.
Importantly, the pavilion (10) just about seen behind Chengling's training area, marks a de facto boundary for this set as it appears in WOH, as the camera angles of these episodes never never stray past it. For a long time - until I began to watch Mysterious Lotus Casebook and Heroes, which handed me the final puzzle pieces to rule out this set as part of the film parks - I thought the entire set must finish just to the right of the pavilion.
That is not so. If I pull up some screenshots from MLC and reintroduce the scant few photographs I've found of the "Mansion Scene" Huaxia set itself from part two, you can see this main courtyard in full:
In these photos and screenshots, we can now see the main courtyard almost in full: the main building with its projecting entrance (I'm unsure if the term portico applies to Asian architecture); the pavillion to its left, standing opposite Building 8 which we will come to in a moment; and Building 11 at the end of what, in MLC, is a central pathway - but that I have interpreted in my own drawing to be a path of scattered stepping stones like the rest of the set, considering the smaller courtyard (5) - as discussed in part two - appears to be taking on the role of a more formal courtyard.
'Everlasting' and 'Gentle Winds'
For a moment, though, I need to draw us back to the main building. This building - Everlasting - is very important as, by vehicle of drama magic, this is where the two Siji sets conflate.
In episode 24 we cut from a shot of the main building in the exterior Siji set, whose sign reads "風輕雲淡" (fēng qīng yún dàn), or "Gentle Winds and Light Clouds," to this interior shot of Everlasting:
And to confirm that this interior shot is Everlasting, or building 6, we return to MLC, where we are treated to an outside-to-inside shot of the build, whose inset floor matches that of WOH's Everlasting building, seen clearest in episode 24, above, and episode 28:
(I do have more screenshots that I may add in later, but right now I'm running out of steam, please just take my word for it. 😂)
Cold River Room
Now, unfortunately I've been unable to place the medicine room, in which ZZS grinds herbs, in what photo resources I have of this film studio. Likewise for the room I've taken to calling the "infirmary" (where WKX takes a healing bath after his confrontation with YBY). Equally as unhelpful, there's simply no discernible exterior details seen from inside these two rooms that I can dig my research claws into and try to identify a placement or orientation for them:
The room they spend their first night at Siji Manor in, however, is a different story. That room - dubbed as the "Cold River Room" by Minna - is Building 8.
This was quite easy to place, thanks to this screenshot of a behind the scenes video (that I've since long lost the link to, unfortunately - if you have a link, I'd be very grateful if you share it with me so that I may add the source). Here, we can see the column inscriptions on Everlasting through the window:
So I can confirm this building to be the room they spend their first night as Siji in, seen here behind Chengling as well as in a MLC screenshot - showing its place across from the pavilion clearly:
The Pond
The last part of the main courtyard - and of this set breakdown overall - is the pond and Building 11:
I had suspected their was some kind of water trough or strip of pond between the seating area (4) and the pavilion (10) for a while, but never had the resources to confirm it. I still can't. However, a film studio's entire purpose is to shapeshift from one design brief to another. Sometimes, there is a pond and sometimes there isn't, as these two images show:
The left image is a photograph from the article about Hengdian's film studios linked above, taken from the seating area (4), while the right image is a screenshot from Heroes episode 13, the camera positioned in front of Building 11. I simply decided that I liked the pond there, so I included it in my Siji layout.
As an aside, in this scene in Heroes, with the camera panning just a bit further right, we get a lovely clear shot of the archway from the formal courtyard (5) to this one:
Finally, we come to Building 11. You'll notice that I called the courtyard of the QHZ snow scene in WOH a "formal" courtyard (5), on account of the clearly defined, linear paving.
However, it doesn't have the large gate of a main courtyard:
This courtyard, the one with Everlasting, does. The winding steppingstones used as paving in the Siji set dressing of this location takes away from the formality of this courtyard that, once you see it in its entirety in shows such as MLC or Heroes, it certainly has. To that point, Building 11 - or rather, structure 11, as may be more appropriate to call it now - is actually a large gateway. This is easiest seen in Heroes, episode 13:
Of course, that doesn't mean we have to designate it as a gateway in the Siji layout. I don't think it's meant to have that identity, based on the above - well, it's not meant to have an identity at all. It's never seen in the show. But, given the Siji set dressing and the resemblance it bears to Building 8, the Cold River Room, I might consider giving it the identity of one of the rooms I've been unable to locate - the infirmary, or the medicine room.
Let me hear your thoughts!
I'd like to hear your suggestions and thoughts on that. On all of it! Because despite all of this research, I am still left with the gargantuan task of drafting it all into a finished piece. And as such, I am still faced with the dilemma I began to outline months ago in part one:
How could I merge these two very different sets together? Should I merge them together?
I have rambled ideas at friends about presenting an architecture draft that is simply reportage - showing both sets, and summarizing the information I've given you all here before making suggestions on how they could combine into "one true set".
But on the other hand, do I draft the Siji I see emerging in the crossover of these two sets - the one I can feel starting to take shape in my brain? And then simply offer this research up as the facts.
There's still a long way to go, but thank you for being here! As always, if you'd like to support my research madness and help fuel my many artistic endeavors, please consider donating to my kofi or checking out my print shop:
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And happy new year! I hope 2024 brings you happiness and opportunity in all that you wish ✨
