24 episodes · complete

Does The Early Spring Have a Happy Ending? Full Episode Guide and Ending Explained

Jing Boran and Sun Qian play a creative director and the junior he told to quit on day one. All 24 episodes are out: Youku closed on 12 September and Netflix a day later, on 13 September. This page covers how the ending lands, which episode they get together and which one breaks them apart, the full cast and character map, and how the drama differs from the source novel. Every spoiler sits inside a collapsed block — nothing is revealed unless you open it.

01Does The Early Spring have a happy ending?

The spoiler-free answer first. Details are folded away below.

Yes, it is a happy ending. The leads end up together. The middle stretch is genuinely painful and there is a long separation, but the close is unambiguous — not open-ended, and not a tragedy.

If you only wanted to know whether to keep going, you can stop here. For how it lands and how it compares to the novel, open the blocks below.

How the ending plays out (spoilers)

After years apart and a great deal of change on both sides, Luan Nian sets his pride down and goes after her. In episodes 23–24 they meet again in a snowbound Harbin, he says what he never said, she accepts, and the series closes on an embrace.

The order is what matters. She had already rebuilt her life before he showed up. The grovelling-ex arc only means something when the other person genuinely no longer needs you — which is exactly what the novel is praised for.

How the drama ending differs from the novel (spoilers)

The shape is the same: both end well. The difference is density. The novel runs on interior monologue and can spell out her calculation — that one more sentence would have ended them. Screen drama has no monologue, so the weight lands on framing, score and expression instead.

The adaptation also adds things. The line written on the postcard in episode 13 is original to the drama; it is not in the book.

The novel also has side stories after the main text, covering Luan Nian’s parents’ generation and the origin of the osmanthus milk. The drama does not film them.

02Episode index: when they get together, when they break up

The turning points by episode. Contents are spoilers, so they are folded.

Three nodes carry the whole structure, useful if you are skipping ahead or going back for a rewatch. The episode numbers themselves are not spoilers — the contents only appear once you open them.

Episode 10 · getting together (spoilers)

They confirm the hidden thing between them at a celebration dinner in episode 9. In episode 10, hearing she is going to a matchmaking date, Luan Nian cannot hold his jealousy, pulls her into the car and kisses her — and the off-the-record relationship begins.

This is the car scene that leaked before release and set the whole show trending.

Episodes 18–19 · the break (spoilers)

In episode 18 an ex-boyfriend reappears, a male flatmate blurs a line, and Shang Zhi-Tao proposes marriage. What comes back is cold, jealous deflection. Immediately after, she loses her flatmate Sun Yuan-Zhu.

Emptied out, she breaks with him across episodes 18–19, resigns and leaves without a word for the north-west. The novel line about this not being an escape but a grand retreat refers to exactly this moment.

Episodes 23–24 · reunion (spoilers)

Years later he travels north. They meet again in Harbin, he tells her the truth, she accepts, and the series ends on an embrace.

This sequence was shot around Zhongyang Street and St. Sophia Cathedral — the locations section below has the full list.

03The Early Spring cast and character map

Organised around the two leads. This section is spoiler-free.

On the official character chart, the label between the two leads is simply “a hidden relationship”. That phrase defines roughly two-thirds of the series.

Around Luan Nian

Around Shang Zhi-Tao

04The Early Spring: full 24-episode release calendar

The series is complete. The table is kept as a record for catching up or rewatching.

The Early Spring premiered on Youku and Kumiao TV on 26 August 2026, with Netflix releasing in step, at 12:00 China time daily. Four episodes on day one, two a day from 27–29 August, one a day from 30 August, and episode 24 on 12 September — eighteen days in total. On Netflix the finale landed a day later, on 13 September.

Full release dates for all 24 episodes

Date	Episodes	Total
8/26 (Wed)	Ep 1–4	4
8/27 (Thu)	Ep 5–6	6
8/28 (Fri)	Ep 7–8	8
8/29 (Sat)	Ep 9–10	10
8/30 (Sun)	Ep 11	11
8/31 (Mon)	Ep 12	12
9/1 (Tue)	Ep 13	13
9/2 (Wed)	Ep 14	14
9/3 (Thu)	Ep 15	15
9/4 (Fri)	Ep 16	16
9/5 (Sat)	Ep 17	17
9/6 (Sun)	Ep 18	18
9/7 (Mon)	Ep 19	19
9/8 (Tue)	Ep 20	20
9/9 (Wed)	Ep 21	21
9/10 (Thu)	Ep 22	22
9/11 (Fri)	Ep 23	23
9/12 (Sat)	Ep 24 · finale	24

Youku opened paid early access on 9 September, unlocking later episodes ahead of schedule. The table above is the normal, unpaid progression, which is also what Netflix followed.

Netflix finished a day later than Youku. Youku closed with episode 24 on 12 September. On Netflix the last three days ran 22 on 11 September, 23 on 12 September and 24 on 13 September. The table above follows Youku; if you watched on Netflix, your finale date is 13 September.

05Youku paid early access, and why Netflix never had it

Three different mechanisms often get confused. Here is what actually applies.

Youku opened paid early access for The Early Spring on 9 September. On top of a membership, viewers can pay an additional fee to unlock episodes ahead of the daily schedule. In Chinese this is called chaodian (超點).

It is not the same as the SVIP head start. Youku SVIP membership already includes seeing one episode more than VIP on each release day, and that costs nothing beyond the subscription. Paid early access is a separate thing: you pay again, on top of membership, to unlock further ahead.

On the normal schedule, 9 September reached episode 21, so paid access unlocked what came after. Now that the series is complete the mechanism no longer matters — but it explains why ending clips were circulating online days before the finale.

Netflix has no paid early access

The Chinese platforms for this drama are Youku and Kumiao TV, and that is where paid early access exists. Netflix has no way to buy episodes ahead — international viewers stay on one episode a day.

So from 9 September the two sides diverge. Paying Youku users are already further into the story while Netflix viewers are still on schedule, finishing on 13 September. If you see people online discussing scenes you have not reached yet, this is why.

The release calendar above shows the normal schedule without paid unlocks, which is the one Netflix viewers should follow.

06The Early Spring: key facts

Adapted from the Jinjiang novel of the same name.

07The story, in three movements

Not a straight-line romance. The relationship is cut into three distinct blocks — and the episode breakdowns follow the same split.

Shang Zhi-Tao has an unremarkable CV but lands an offer at a top advertising agency. On her first day, creative director Luan Nian tells her to give up and go home. What follows spans nearly a decade.

1. ACT 01 · BEIJING · EP 1–8

   Meeting, and frictionbreakdown coming

   Hired and immediately told to quit. Under agency pressure the antagonism turns into something neither will name — a relationship kept off the record because he is her boss.

2. ACT 02 · SIX YEARS · EP 9–16

   Together, then gonebreakdown coming

   Their careers climb side by side while the distance quietly grows. She leaves Beijing for her hometown without telling him, and cuts contact entirely.

3. ACT 03 · HARBIN · EP 17–24

   Winter reunionbreakdown coming

   Years later he goes north to find her. By then she runs her own shop and has stopped burning herself out for anyone. The power balance between them has completely inverted.

08Three reasons to watch

09Official trailer

Netflix’s trailer collects most of the scenes people are talking about.

Source: Netflix official YouTube channel

10Where The Early Spring was filmed in Harbin

The third act was shot in a real snow city in north-east China.

The Beijing office scenes were shot first; the crew moved to Harbin in November 2025 for the winter and homecoming material. Locations include Zhongyang Street, the square beside St. Sophia Cathedral, the Donghechang 1917 creative district, and West 13th Street, where an old restaurant was rebuilt as the bar the lead runs in the final act. Filming wrapped on Jinlong Mountain at the end of November 2025.

To see the snow the way the show frames it, go between December and February, which overlaps with the Harbin Ice and Snow Festival. For an actual early spring, go in March. A full location guide is coming as a separate piece.

11The Early Spring OST: ten tracks

Three characters get a song of their own — which tells you who actually matters.

Source: official OST playlist on YouTube

Two things stand out. Yu Yan wrote four of the ten — the three character songs plus the ending theme — so the emotional core of the score comes from a single pen and shares a musical vocabulary. And Sun Yuan-Zhu, a supporting character, gets his own track: a production that commissions a character song for a side role is not planning to cut that thread.

12The six best passages in the novel, and not one is a confession

Read the novel and one thing stands out: it almost never proves feeling through dialogue. The evidence sits in behaviour, in timetables, in sentences that stop one line short — waking up early, unsigned flowers, a detour past her building on a route that goes the other way. Summarised below, not quoted.

The one who started waking up early

She always left early on Saturday mornings. For the first couple of months he was usually still asleep when she went — he only ever slept in at weekends. At some point, without announcement, he started getting up a little earlier on those mornings.

He says nothing in the whole passage and the author never explains it. The strongest evidence of a relationship here is a routine quietly rewritten. This is the clearest case of what readers call his ten-four problem: he gives ten and shows four. He does care. He just refuses to let anyone see it.

Flowers with no name on them

She mentions offhand that she would like to be sent flowers. The next day a bouquet arrives with a card carrying one short line of good wishes and no signature. She asks everyone around her; everyone denies it. The next day another one comes, and the next, and the next.

He does it and takes no credit. That pattern explains why she spent so long unsure of her place with him — not because he did nothing, but because he hid the evidence. For someone already looking up at him, unclaimed kindness makes the ground less steady, not more.

The sunrise, and the sunset

On the morning they watch the sun come up by the sea, she says she is glad to be seeing it with him, then adds that one day she would like to watch the sun go down with him too.

Sunrise is now. Sunset is later. What she is actually asking for is a future, and she only dares put it as an image. The novel is blunt about the reason: one more sentence and that day would have been the end of them. She knows exactly how far she is allowed to go — the clearest picture of the power gap in the whole book, clearer than any argument.

Ten things before thirty

She once wrote a list of ten things to do before turning thirty. Learn languages, get a driving licence, take her parents travelling, read, buy a car, own a small flat in Beijing — only the last item involves another person.

That list quietly predicts the ending. Her life was never empty; the relationship occupies one slot out of ten. So when she rebuilds everything back home years later, it is not sudden strength, it is a plan she already had. The grovelling-ex arc works here for one reason: nine of her wishes never needed him.

Osmanthus milk: the favouritism is inherited

His father used to make osmanthus milk for his mother. Osmanthus only grows in the south, so it had to be preserved and sent up by his mother’s side of the family; if the household could get hold of milk, the children got the drink too. One ordinary cup, two processes, two places, two generations.

After meeting his parents, she thinks the unforced tenderness in him probably came from his mother. More precisely, it came from what his father did — that family expresses love with verbs, not adjectives.

So he cooks. He deveins the prawns before frying them. He remembers what she likes to eat. He is not incapable of saying it; nobody in that house ever said it. Which loops back and explains the early mornings and the unsigned flowers: he had been speaking the only language he knew, and she could not receive it.

The favouring has to be obvious before it registers

The novel puts it plainly: she is not a perceptive person, so she only feels favoured when the favouring is unmistakable.

That single line diagnoses the entire first half. He gives ten and shows four; her receiver only lights up at ten. They lose years not to a shortage of love but to a mismatch of units. He thinks he has given a great deal, she thinks she has received nothing, and neither of them is lying.

So later he changes method: he stops hiding, makes the favouritism impossible to miss, and eventually asks her outright whether she can feel it now. Moving from hidden kindness to visible favouring is the real character arc of this book — and it belongs to him, not to her.

13FAQ

Does The Early Spring have a happy ending?

Yes. All 24 episodes close on a reunion — the leads get back together in Harbin. It is neither open-ended nor a tragedy. Details and the novel comparison are in the collapsed blocks on this page.

Which episode do they get together, and which one do they break up?

They confirm things in episode 9 and begin in episode 10, break across episodes 18–19 when she resigns and leaves Beijing, then reunite in Harbin in episodes 23–24.

Has The Early Spring finished? How many episodes?

It is complete: 24 episodes of about 45 minutes, premiering 26 August 2026. Youku ended on 12 September and Netflix a day later, on 13 September.

Will there be a season 2 of The Early Spring?

No sequel has been announced. The novel is a single completed book with side stories after the main text, covering Luan Nian’s parents’ generation, which the drama did not film.

Is the drama ending the same as the novel?

The shape is the same and both end well. The novel carries far more interior monologue; the drama replaces it with framing and score, and adds scenes of its own such as the episode 13 postcard.

How was The Early Spring released?

Daily at 12:00 China Standard Time. Four episodes on the premiere day, two a day from 27–29 August, then one a day from 30 August until episode 24 on 12 September. On Netflix the finale was a day later, on 13 September.

When did The Early Spring finale air?

Episode 24 aired on 12 September 2026 on Youku and on 13 September on Netflix.

When does paid early access open for The Early Spring?

Youku opens paid early access on 9 September 2026. Members can pay an extra fee, on top of their subscription, to unlock episodes ahead of the daily release.

Can I pay to watch The Early Spring early on Netflix?

No. Paid early access exists only on the Chinese platforms Youku and Kumiao TV. Netflix has no equivalent and continues to release one episode a day at 12:00 China time.

Is The Early Spring on Netflix?

Yes. Netflix carries it internationally and is currently releasing in step with the Chinese platforms, on the same daily schedule.

Is The Early Spring based on a novel?

Yes, on the same-titled web novel by Guniang Bie Ku, published on Jinjiang Literature City. Only a Chinese-language edition exists; there is no official English translation.

Who stars in The Early Spring?

Jing Boran plays advertising creative director Luan Nian and Sun Qian plays junior copywriter Shang Zhi-Tao. Jiang Ji-Zheng directs from a script by Gao Xiao-Xian.

Is The Early Spring a fluffy romance?

No. It runs on restraint, mixed signals and things left unsaid, and includes a long separation before the reunion. Closer to an adult relationship drama than a sweet one.