5Y News | "Drama Peach Blossom Spring" Raises Tens of Millions of RMB in Angel Round to Build Urban Immersive Amusement Parks

The "Drama Peach Blossom Spring" project recently announced it has raised tens of millions of RMB in angel funding, co-led by 5Y Capital and Black Ant Capital. The project aims to build an immersive amusement park in core urban areas for a new generation of young consumers. Its first location is scheduled to open by year-end at Viva Beijing Fuli Plaza in Beijing's Shuangjing area, spanning nearly 3,000 square meters.

Yuan Ye, Partner at 5Y Capital, said: "The importance of premium content for platforms is becoming increasingly evident, and Drama Peach Blossom Spring has the potential to become scarce supply for the industry. Younger generations' demand for experiences and content has permeated every scene of life, and Drama Peach Blossom Spring creates an entirely new scenario for experience, consumption, and social interaction. We very much look forward to this new combination of 'people, goods, and place' becoming a commercial and cultural phenomenon of this era."

Zhu Zilong

Founder, Drama Peach Blossom Spring

Q1

What was your original intention in founding Drama Peach Blossom Spring? Why did you choose this name?

Zhu Zilong: From the very beginning of our work in immersive experiences, we've always wanted to create a world that is "virtual yet real" — virtual enough that participants can forget their real-world identities and labels, and feel the joy of temporarily becoming someone else, being themselves, choosing and experiencing like children, showing their inner drama-queen side; while "real" means we strive to enhance the freedom and openness of this world, making it more lifelike, so participants can immerse themselves from multiple dimensions. Of course, as the metaverse concept becomes more widely understood, whether these two worlds can directly interact and flexibly switch — this is also a direction we're very eager to explore.

There were several considerations in choosing the name Drama Peach Blossom Spring:

1. It carries on the "drama" tradition. In the world of Drama, participants still don't need to perform, nor do they need any psychological or technical threshold. We believe everyone has a latent "dramatic nature" that wants to experience something different, and we simply want to inspire people to release and feel it. So "drama" as a term, though crude, is accurate.

2. The Peach Blossom Spring setting is mainly because this IP carries a certain mystique — after all, it's a "legendary" place that gives people more desire to explore, and the product can therefore be more imaginative and inclusive. At the same time, at its core, the Peach Blossom Spring is a simple, beautiful village. What will ultimately resonate emotionally with participants won't be mystery or the unknown, but familiarity and warmth. So what the final product needs to convey is still a world of neighbors and simple beauty — making Peach Blossom Spring a fitting positioning.

Q2

How do you view Gen Z consumption? What are you curious about when it comes to Gen Z?

Zhu Zilong: The essence of consumption is the expression of need. Consumers' decisions carry their personalities, hobbies, or the emotions and impulses at the moment of purchase — it's an extension of their values. Gen Z's consumption expression is notably characterized by their pursuit of "looks are justice" self-pleasure, the ability to express themselves and find their kind through social interaction, and value identification with brands, rather than functional satisfaction in the traditional sense. This determines that consumer brands favored by Gen Z must, to some extent, meet their core demands.

Gen Z has significant commonalities. Born into the mobile internet era, their world is relatively flat — cognitive deviations from information asymmetry are unlikely. In this objective environment, on one hand, Gen Z pursues personalized expression, seeking difference and uniqueness, and is more willing to pay for niche, individual products. On the other hand, many vertical subcultural circles, under Gen Z's embrace, are quickly accepted and gradually become mainstream. This phenomenon of subjectively pursuing the niche while objectively elevating it to mainstream status — what challenges this poses to brands and consumption is a direction we're very curious about and willing to explore.

David Wu

Senior Investment Manager, 5Y Capital

Q1

Why invest in Drama Peach Blossom Spring?

David Wu: A format, a brand — to commercial real estate, these are all content. When traffic and customer acquisition become general industry resources, the scarcity of premium content is gradually being recognized by both supply and demand sides. Drama Peach Blossom Spring builds its scarce content from the angle of experience and entertainment. Through continuous refinement and accumulation, we hope there can be different paths to create China's own commercial and cultural phenomena.

The team is no newcomer to immersive experiences. Their small-scale prototype has already received excellent feedback from consumers. But they didn't stop there — instead, they used the prototype as a commercial experiment for this larger format, continuously testing content, large crowd capacity, retail, and various modules. This mentality of long-term accumulation and constant evolution impressed us all.

Q2

What is your understanding of Gen Z consumption? What are your imaginations for this industry's future?

David Wu: Gen Z's consumption mindset is seeking solutions at both ends. One end is strong demand for diversity, richness, and freshness — always new, continuously providing differentiated supply. The other end is demand for cost-effectiveness, stable quality, and reduced decision-making costs.

Drama Peach Blossom Spring is our new attempt at the diversity supply end. On an underlying content framework and scene framework that remains largely unchanged, it provides content freshness through events and characters, visual and experiential freshness through new interactive technologies, consumption freshness through continuous merchant recruitment and co-branding, and brand mindshare freshness through more stores and co-creation with more consumers.

"Drama Peach Blossom Spring" is produced by Beijing Drama Culture. Founder Zhu Zilong stated that the project inherits Drama Culture's "Chinese style only" ethos, using Peach Blossom Spring as its backdrop. Through immersive spaces, live actors, storylines and game mechanics, combined with retail, dining, and experience formats, it uses spatial content to guide and drive consumption, creating an integrated offline entertainment format.

The Drama Peach Blossom Spring team comprises elites from film, theater, stage production, and gaming, among other industries. The team previously created the immersive interactive theater brand "INX Drama Academy" in 2018, with extensive experience in live entertainment and youth consumption.

The project continues Drama Culture's previous user profile centered on Chinese style, ACG (anime, comics, games), and "three pits" (Lolita fashion, Hanfu, and JK uniforms) audiences. Named "Drama Peach Blossom Spring," it hopes participants can, from the moment they enter the space, embark on a parallel-world-like new journey and experience different lives.

Zhu Zilong judges that in recent years, consumer demand for scenario-based consumption and immersive experiences has noticeably increased. Young customer groups uphold new concepts and demands such as "looks are justice" and "experience supreme," and their spending power is gradually strengthening. This has brought new opportunities to the spatial content industry — a large amount of youth consumption enthusiasm has nowhere to go, and Drama Peach Blossom Spring was born in response.

Zhu Zilong also revealed that Drama Peach Blossom Spring has three core labels: Chinese style, offline social interaction, and an open world view.

Specifically, he believes that unlike previous consumption waves, the rise of Chinese style is an inevitable expression of national and cultural confidence brought by strong national economic power, which objectively guides and drives public affection for Chinese style and trends, and will continue long-term. Immersive experiences satisfy young people's consumption needs for emotional immersion and self-expression, attracting tribes with similar labels to gather and becoming a new experience for offline social interaction. In building an open world view, Drama Peach Blossom Spring emphasizes a "parallel world feeling." Unlike traditional story reproduction or linear experiences, it possesses a complete world system and backdrop, combining open-world, nurturing, and roguelike mechanics to create a Westworld-like urban immersive amusement park for users.

In terms of format, Drama Peach Blossom Spring will include food, entertainment, and various experience formats with young people as the core profile. Zhu Zilong also hopes to collaborate with many interesting young brands, linking their brands with in-scene story content to create more vivid and interesting consumption scenarios and brand stories.

The structure of China's offline entertainment formats is changing. On one hand, according to iResearch, China's script murder market reached 10.97 billion RMB in 2019, up 68% year-on-year. In 2020, even though offline stores were significantly impacted by COVID, the industry still achieved 7% growth against the trend. The market is expected to grow to 17.02 billion RMB in 2021. On the other hand, the mainland Chinese film market, also affected by the pandemic, recorded total box office of 20.417 billion RMB for all of 2020.

In Zhu Zilong's view, immersive experience projects compete for users' offline time. Other venues that can consume offline time include movie theaters, KTVs, and arcades. Drama Peach Blossom Spring aims to compete for this time, seeking to replace them and become young people's new offline entertainment consumption destination.

5Y Capital (formerly Morningside Venture Capital) currently manages approximately five billion USD in dual-currency USD and RMB funds. We believe that if the "crazy you" in others' eyes starts to be believed in, the world will be a better place.

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