Descendants of the Sun: the Korean military romance sweeping Asia

By Tessa Wong

BBC News

Korean television dramas have always been popular across Asia, but the region may have hit peak K-drama fever with military romance Descendants of the Sun.

Love is a battlefield

The 16-episode show began airing on South Korean television in February. It is also being simulcast online in China and streamed on other websites - not always legally - watched by South East Asian fans.

It has all the familiar ingredients of a K-drama: a convoluted plot, A-list actors and an exotic location - in this case Greece, standing in as the fictional wartorn Mediterranean country Uruk.

But one unique feature of Descendants of the Sun is its military setting - it is often not fate that gets in the way of the main characters' happiness, but the urgencies of war.

"The surgeon is a woman with a First World problem in a five-star package. She has a mystery man who is totally into her but who keeps leaving. Yet the drama also keeps reuniting them in airbrushed, beautified real-world circumstances," was how one Singaporean newspaper review summed up its premise.

International appeal

At home, the drama has broken viewership records and won plaudits from even the likes of President Park Geun-hye, who said it could help spread South Korean culture and boost tourism.

The city of Taekbaek, where some of the filming took place, is now planning to rebuild the film set because of intense interest from tourists, reports the Korea Times.

But its main fan base lies overseas, particularly China, where so far it has been viewed more than 440 million times on popular video-streaming siteiQiyi.com. The show has been sold to 27 countries including the UK and translated into 32 different languages, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency.