The score to hit drama Jade Goddess of Mercy is back, this time as a reimagined album, Chen Nan reports.

The melody arrived softly at first: a violin tracing a line of longing above the quiet pulse of a piano. Inside the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing on a late May afternoon, the opening notes of Yu Guanyin, or Jade Goddess of Mercy, were enough to suspend time.

For many audiences in China, the music carries them instantly back more than two decades, to an era when Chinese television dramas unfolded with an almost novelistic emotional seriousness — stories of love and betrayal, desire and sacrifice, set against the turbulence of a rapidly changing country.

Now the music itself has returned, transformed.

On May 24, composer Ye Xiaogang joined singer Zhu Hua, violinist Li Yuhe and pianist Feng Huaiyu for an event marking the release of a new vinyl album inspired by Ye's celebrated score for the television adaptation of Chinese writer Hai Yan's best-selling novel, Jade Goddess of Mercy.

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The namesake TV series, Jade Goddess of Mercy, premiered in 2003 and follows the journey of An Xin, a young woman who transforms from an ordinary girl into a daring undercover narcotics officer. The story explores An Xin's complex emotional world as she becomes embedded within a dangerous drug trafficking organization. Her life is entangled with three men — the dedicated officer Tie Jun, the cunning dealer Mao Jie, and Yang Rui, an ordinary urban young man who is the emotional anchor and narrative viewpoint of the drama — forming a tense web of love, loyalty, and betrayal. Against this backdrop, the drama interweaves high-stakes anti-drug operations in Yunnan province, juxtaposing An Xin's inner struggles with intense, suspenseful action. At its heart, the series is a story of duty, sacrifice, and the human cost of fighting crime, where personal desire often collides with moral responsibility.

The black vinyl edition, released by NCPA Classics, does not simply reproduce the original soundtrack familiar to television audiences of the early 2000s. At the heart of the new release are two orchestral works that trace the evolution of Jade Goddess of Mercy from television soundtrack to contemporary concert music. The Jade Goddess of Mercy Orchestra Suite (2001) stands as the foundational pillar of Ye's musical world for Jade Goddess of Mercy. Moving beyond the functional demands of screen scoring, Ye reimagined and expanded the drama's central themes symphonically, transforming them into an autonomous orchestral work that has since become a lasting staple in the repertoire of major Chinese orchestras.

More than two decades later, Jade Goddess of Mercy Capriccio for Violin and Orchestra (2023), commissioned by the Hangzhou Philharmonic Orchestra, revisits that emotional landscape from a more introspective and expansive perspective. Built around an extended dialogue between solo violin and orchestra, the work draws on the violin's warm, tensile sound to explore the music's emotional undercurrents with greater depth and freedom. The result feels less like a return to familiar material than a poetic reimagining — a work with themes once bound to the screen that unfold with renewed lyricism and emotional scope.

Together, the works chart the unusual afterlife of a television score that has steadily migrated from popular culture into China's contemporary concert repertoire.

"The music has continued to grow," Ye says. "It walked out of the television drama and became something independent."

Ye notes that many of the musical ideas developed in Jade Goddess of Mercy Capriccio for Violin and Orchestra never appeared in the earlier suite.

"In that sense, this album brings together nearly all the themes from the television drama that I felt deserved to be further developed and shared with a wider audience," says Ye.

For Ye, now one of China's most internationally recognized contemporary composers, the origins of Jade Goddess of Mercy still feel strangely fated.

He recalls buying Hai Yan's novel almost accidentally and reading it straight through. By the end, he had become convinced that the story demanded music. Not long afterward, director Ding Hei approached him to compose the score for the adaptation.

To prepare, Ye traveled to Xishuangbanna in Yunnan province, where parts of the drama were filmed. He observed local life, spoke with actors and immersed himself in the emotional atmosphere of the story.

Although he now describes the actual writing process as instinctive, he insists that spontaneity only becomes possible after deep emotional preparation.

The resulting music was unusually lyrical for Chinese television at the time, blending symphonic structure with an emotional openness more commonly associated with cinema than serialized drama. Some members of the production reportedly worried that the score sounded too classical and not commercially viable. Ye refused to simplify it.

The novelist Hai Yan later joked that the television series itself had become "a music video for Ye Xiaogang's music", because the production team became reluctant to cut scenes that carried the score's emotional momentum.

Over the years, the music developed a life beyond the series. Orchestras across China began performing the suite version regularly, and audiences continued to associate its melodies with a particular emotional atmosphere: restrained longing, romantic fatalism, and moral vulnerability.

The recording was completed in Berlin, Germany, in November 2024 with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under conductor Stefan Malzew.

"Even without a shared spoken language," Ye says, "music became our common language."

The afternoon also revisited Ye's long creative partnership with singer Zhu, whose performance of the drama's theme song became inseparable from the series' emotional identity.

Returning now to the music of Jade Goddess of Mercy after 25 years, Zhu describes how age has altered her understanding of the work.

"When I sang it years ago, there were emotions I could not fully understand," she says. "Now they feel very clear."

Time, she suggests, has softened the technical self-consciousness of youth. Her voice now moves more freely within the orchestral texture, particularly alongside the strings.

In contemporary China's entertainment industry, where soundtrack music is often designed for speed, algorithmic circulation and immediate commercial impact, the survival of Jade Goddess of Mercy feels increasingly unusual. Its endurance owes less to nostalgia alone than to the seriousness of its artistic ambition.

Ye spoke candidly during the discussion about what he sees as the shrinking creative space for composers in film and television today. Producers increasingly treat music as a functional background, he says, rather than as an equal narrative force.

For him, Jade Goddess of Mercy belongs to a different moment — one in which directors and composers were willing to shape scenes around musical ideas rather than merely decorate finished images with sound.

That philosophy also informs Ye's broader thinking about contemporary Chinese composition. Educated largely within Western classical traditions, he has long sought to reconcile European structural rigor with distinctly Chinese aesthetic sensibilities: restraint, silence, and emotional space.

But he warned against superficial forms of East-West fusion now common among younger artists.

True synthesis, he argues, must emerge from a deeper cultural consciousness rooted in Chinese philosophical traditions — ideas of harmony, coexistence and the relationship between humanity and nature.

Contact the writer at chennan@chinadaily.com.cn