Velvet Shade’s “Fragrance Love Letters” are some of the most elaborate side content in Where Winds Meet, and Du Gantang sits right at the center of one of them. Players meet names like Hua Jieyu, Lu Yanling, and Yu the Musician without much trouble, then slam into a wall when the trail turns toward Du Gantang.
The short version: the game sets up a full mini-story about Du Gantang and the Wu siblings, but the encounter currently fails to progress. Knowing what the quest is trying to do makes it easier to understand why you’re stuck — and why you can safely stop searching for hidden triggers for now.
How Du Gantang fits into Velvet Shade’s love letters
Velvet Shade in Kaifeng is packed with overlapping quest lines:
- Jianghu Legacy quests such as Shadows in Bloom and Streetwise Sage that revolve around Revelry Hall and the Nine Mortal Ways.
- Fragrance Love Letter collections, where each card represents a short romantic vignette anchored to locations like Bustling Abode, Springwave Pavilion, and other “Twelve Floral Scenes” spots.
Characters such as Hua Jieyu, Lu Yanling, Hua Zhiqing, Yu the Musician, and Du Gantang are used as anchors for specific fragrance cards. You track them down in and around Velvet Shade, usually after talking to the right NPCs in Revelry Hall or nearby shops.
For most of these cards, the pattern is consistent:
- You talk to a “gossip” NPC (often on the upper floors of Revelry Hall).
- They point you to a second NPC (for example, Mu Ci at the Silver Flower Shop or an attendant at Springwave Pavilion).
- That NPC nudges you to the final location, where the target figure is actually present and can be spoken to or investigated.
Du Gantang is designed to follow a similar pattern, but the chain currently stops one step too early.
How the Du Gantang encounter is supposed to start
The Du Gantang arc is tied to the “Sweet Pear Stories” fragrance love letter in Velvet Shade. It involves three key NPCs:
- Wu Hanxia – a woman near Springwave Pavilion who asks about her younger brother.
- Wu Jinhang – the brother, encountered near Halo Peak in Qinghe.
- Du Gantang – the object of Wu Jinhang’s affection, intended to appear in a Kaifeng pavilion scene.
When everything works, the intended flow looks like this:
Step 1: In Kaifeng, go to the area south of the Springwave Pavilion teleport stone in Velvet Shade. There, you find Wu Hanxia. She opens the thread by asking whether you have seen her younger brother, who has fallen in love with Du Gantang.
Step 2: Following Hanxia’s information, you travel to Qinghe, to the road south of the Halo Peak teleport stone in the Sundara Land sub-region. Along that path, you encounter her brother Wu Jinhang.
Step 3: You speak with the brother, which should advance the fragrance love letter quest toward an eventual meeting with Du Gantang back in Kaifeng.
On paper, this mirrors the structure of other encounter-style vignettes: a hook NPC in one zone, a follow-up in another, then a final emotional beat in Velvet Shade.
Where the Du Gantang quest currently breaks
In practice, Wu Hanxia appears and starts the rumor about her brother and Du Gantang, and Wu Jinhang (sometimes misidentified in chat as Wu Jinming) can be found on the road south of Halo Peak. The problem is what happens after you talk to him: nothing.
Players can exhaust his dialogue, but:
- No new objective is added.
- No new encounter marker appears back in Velvet Shade.
- Du Gantang never spawns at the pavilion where he is meant to stand.
Multiple details line up around the missing NPC:
- A pavilion in Velvet Shade (linked to the “Twelve Floral Scenes” map) has signage indicating a love-letter related encounter that references Du Gantang’s name and implies he should be present.
- Nearby, a sweeper NPC (Yu the Musician in some threads) stands in the back of the pavilion, reinforcing that this is the correct staging area.
- Switching the time of day, toggling between solo and online modes, and replaying the Wu Hanxia → Wu Jinhang sequence do not cause Du Gantang to appear.
As a result, the Sweet Pear Stories card that depends on Du Gantang cannot be completed. Players report being able to finish other Velvet Shade fragrance cards, such as those tied to Hua Jieyu and Lu Yanling, while Sweet Pear Stories remains the single remaining slot in the collection.
Related NPCs often confused with Du Gantang
The Du Gantang thread sits inside a crowded part of the game’s quest design, and several nearby NPCs frequently get mixed into the search.
- Hua Jieyu – Her wandering tale “Reverie of Blossoms” sends you from the third floor of Revelry Hall to the Silver Flower Shop, then to Springwave Pavilion, and finally to Bustling Abode. Her card is unrelated to Du Gantang, but players often chase both at once.
- Hua Zhiqing – Despite her “under the tree” clue, she never physically appears. Her Fading Blossoms card unlocks by seizing the Tumi key from Mei Aoxue in Bustling Abode, then opening a locked side room and investigating a letter inside.
- Lu Yanling – She sits on a roof behind the dancers on the circular platform at Pearlglow Lake in Bustling Abode. She is easy to miss but reliably spawns once you are in the correct spot.
- Yu the Musician – Needed for the “Rippling Nymph” love letter. She appears near the spring-side pavilion (named Springbreeze or Springseeker in different maps) opposite Silver Flower Shop, and talking to her completes that card.
The overlap between these characters and locations (Revelry Hall’s upper floors, Silver Flower Shop, Springwave/Springbreeze/Springseeker, Bustling Abode) makes it easy to assume Du Gantang is simply hidden a bit better. In reality, his step in the chain is what fails.
What you can do now if you’re hunting Du Gantang
Right now, the key facts are:
- Wu Hanxia can be found south of the Springwave Pavilion teleport stone in Velvet Shade.
- Her brother Wu Jinhang can be found south of Halo Peak’s teleport stone in Qinghe, along the main path.
- Speaking to both of them does not reliably unlock any further progression.
- Du Gantang does not appear at the pavilion where signage and maps suggest he should stand, regardless of time-of-day or mode toggling.
That means you can safely:
- Check off that you have discovered the Wu siblings and heard their dialogue.
- Stop scouring Velvet Shade for hidden triggers, since none of the usual tricks (calendar changes, solo/online switching, resetting the zone) have any documented effect on Du Gantang’s spawn.
For completionists, the practical approach is to finish every other Velvet Shade fragrance card and side story — including Shadows in Bloom, Streetwise Sage, and all the existing Fragrance Love Letters — and simply leave the Sweet Pear Stories slot empty until a patch explicitly addresses Du Gantang’s encounter.
Where Winds Meet’s side content is dense, and Fragrance Love Letters are some of its most fragile systems because they rely on many conditional NPC spawns spread across regions. Du Gantang’s missing appearance is a good example: all of the narrative scaffolding is in place, from Wu Hanxia’s rumor to the signage at the pavilion, but the final figure never materializes. If you’ve followed the Wu siblings’ thread and still haven’t found him, you are not missing a hidden mechanic — you have simply run up against the edge of what the current build allows.
