The film is adapted from the novella of the same name published by Taiwan Province woman writer Lin Haiyin 1960. "Old Things in the South of the City" was first adapted into a film literary script by Yiming, the director of Beijing Film Factory. The original novel was written by five people in five paragraphs. When it was adapted, all of "Aunt Lan" and the second half of "snowballing" were deleted.
"The Legend of Huian Pavilion" remained basically intact and became the first part of the film; The first half of "Let's go to see the sea" and "Rolling on a donkey" and "Dad's flowers have fallen" are mixed together to form the next part with two paragraphs.
The background of Lin Haiyin's novel of the same name;
"Old Things in the South of the City" was written by Lin Haiyin with his life at the age of 7 to 13 as the background. During the occupation of Taiwan Province by Japanese imperialism, the Lin Haiyin family refused to live under the Japanese aggressors' iron hoof and moved to Beijing, where Xiaoying grew up. Seeing the camel team coming under the winter sun and hearing the slow and pleasant bell, childhood came back to the author's mind.
Summer passed, autumn passed, winter came again, and the camel team came again, but childhood never returned. Because the author missed the scenery and characters when he lived in the south of Beijing as a child, he wrote them down, so that the actual childhood passed and the childhood of the soul survived forever. This is the original intention of Lin Haiyin in writing this novel.