ISSN: 2222-6990
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This article examines how Blossoms Shanghai (Fanhua, 2023) renewed public attention to Haipai (Shanghai-style) culture by combining auteurist visual aesthetics, place-based symbols, and a narrativised entrepreneurial ethos. Framed by cross cultural communication and place branding, we adopt a multimodal, text led qualitative design to analyse the drama’s visual grammar, character arcs, and discourses of identity and taste. We integrate visual semiotics, feminist critical discourse analysis, and thematic analysis to show how architecture, dialect, cuisine, and dress interact with plotlines of market reform, mobility, and intimacy to produce resonant place imaginaries. Drawing on industry and platform reports, we document short term indicators of cultural and tourism spillovers and treat these signals as contextual traces rather than causal estimates. We argue that the series operates as a relay between the port city sensibility of auteur cinema and the mass address of serialised television, enabling mediated forms of belonging and attachment that circulate across regions while remaining locally anchored. The study clarifies how aesthetic density becomes social practice and outlines implications for regionally grounded cultural production and for the integration of film and television, urban culture, and tourism.
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