Traey Guan Xiao-Tong 关晓彤
By the age of eighteen, Traey Guan had already played the on-screen daughter of so many famous actors that in China she was nicknamed "the nation's daughter." She was often cast as girls who made life hard for the grown-ups around them. In the series To Be a Better Man, her Peng Jiahe answers every attempt to look after her with a barb, and it takes time to see how lonely she really is. For that role, Guan won a White Magnolia Award while still in her first year at film academy. Since then she has played no shortage of princesses, and on television she is especially good at playing young women who have to fight for their place in the family or learn to make their own way in life.
Guan Xiao-Tong was born on September 17, 1997, in Beijing. Her father, Guan Shao-Ceng, worked at the Beijing Children's Theatre and appeared on television, while her grandfather Guan Xue-Ceng was a master of Beijing qinshu — the art of telling stories in song to music. He taught his granddaughter to play the yangqin, the Chinese hammered dulcimer, and rehearsed two numbers from his repertoire with her. In a memoir published in 2017, Xiao-Tong recalled how her grandfather took her to Taoranting Park and to the bird market. While her father was filming, her mother, Li Jun, looked after her.
According to her parents, at the age of four Xiao-Tong first appeared in the series Huan Mie, in which her father also played. The crew happened to need a little girl. Biographies usually date this shoot to 2001, while interviews with her parents give 2002. Soon afterwards she played the daughter of the title heroine in Huo Jian-Qi's rural drama Nuan (2003). The Paper calls this film her debut and dates the shoot to 2001, noting that the actress was four and a half. The picture won the top prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival. When Xiao-Tong could not yet read, the adults helped her work through her lines, and she learned them by ear. Tears were the hardest. As the actress recalled, on one of her first shoots the director made her cry by telling her that her mother had abandoned her.
Chen Kaige's fantasy The Promise (2005) opens with a scene featuring Xiao-Tong. She plays young Qing Cheng, who finds a steamed bun on a dead soldier and outwits a boy trying to take it from her. The adult Qing Cheng was played by Cecilia Cheung Pak-Chi. The director was looking for a girl who was clever and at the same time a little wild. After the film's release, Xiao-Tong began to be recognized. In middle school, she says, her parents hardly let her act. She studied at the school attached to Beijing Normal University, danced in the school ensemble, and caught up on what she had missed after shoots.
In May-December Love (2014) she played the daughter of Wang Zhi-Wen's character, and in One Servant of Two Masters, released the same year, the stubborn Yang Shu-Miao, raised single-handedly by her father. She had already worked with Zhang Jia-Yi, who played the father. Xiao-Tong recalled that in the scenes where they ate watermelon, Zhang would start simply by offering her a slice. For Shu-Miao she received the Best Supporting Actress award at the Handan festival. And in The Left Ear (2015), Alec Su You-Peng's directorial debut, she played the hot-tempered Jiang Jiao. The scene of her kidnapping was shot from morning until four the following morning. Guan recalled that by the end of the shoot her legs were covered in scrapes and her shoulder was bruised. She was pleased with the scene.
In 2016, while the series To Be a Better Man was airing on television, Guan sat the national college entrance exam. She scored 552 points, 131 of them in mathematics, and before that had achieved the best result in the creative competition of the Beijing Film Academy's acting department. In her final years of school she had missed a great deal because of filming and, by her own account, sometimes studied with tutors for ten hours a day. Her admission was announced in July, and in September she began her studies. By then audiences already knew her as Peng Jia-He, the prickly girl in a leather jacket and dark glasses who, after her father's death, is taken under the wing of a chef played by Sun Hong-Lei. In 2017 this role brought her the White Magnolia award for Best Supporting Actress at the Shanghai Television Festival. She was nineteen when it was presented, and the festival announced her as the youngest ever recipient of the prize.
Back in 2016, Novoland: The Castle in the Sky came out, in which Guan played the meek Yi Fuling with her quiet voice and bookish way of speaking. In an interview with The Paper, she admitted that romantic scenes were the hardest for her. In Sweet Combat (2018), she was cast as Fang Yu, a martial arts champion who helps a newcomer find his feet. He was played by singer and actor Lu Han, a former member of EXO, while the role of the school principal went to Xiaotong's father. On 8 October 2017, after filming had wrapped, Lu Han called Guan his girlfriend on Weibo. She responded from her own account. The series premiere was still nine months away.
In the autumn of 2018, Guan appeared in Zhang Yi-Mou's Shadow. They had already worked together on a project for the Beijing Olympics, but Xiaotong was a child then. This time she played Qing Ping, the ruler's sister, who goes into battle herself after a humiliating offer to become a concubine. Her weapon is an umbrella with blades. The prop was heavy, and Guan began training in the gym more often so she could wield the umbrella with greater confidence. She travelled with the film to Venice, where it screened out of competition.
In February 2019, Guan and the "Soul Voice" troupe performed on a show on Zhejiang Television, where she danced the lead part in the "Thousand-Hand Guanyin" dance. The Chinese troupe of artists with disabilities that performed the original production by choreographer Zhang Jigang stated that they had not been asked for permission to stage it. The following day, the show's creators publicly apologised to the choreographer and the troupe.
HKCinema first reported on the start of shooting for Oversize Love (2020) back in December 2018, when the news referred to the comedy as "Half Alice". Guan played a girl who loses weight with the help of a magic remedy. According to the actress and the director, the makeup for the scenes before the transformation took five to six hours, though the press also reported four. Guan said that the heavy silicone prosthetics hindered her movement and restricted her facial expressions.
By the end of her studies at the film academy, Guan had played one of four students in the series Twenty Your Life On (2020). Her Liang Shuang's first order of business is to demand that her dorm mates turn off the lights at half past ten. She needs her sleep. Guan had to come up with the reason for her character's habit of keeping people at arm's length herself. According to the actress, this helped her play the scene in which Liang Shuang, after a breakup, pours her heart out to the voice assistant on her phone. In the series Twenty Your Life On 2 (2022), Liang Shuang now makes a living selling products in livestreams. Even before filming, Guan had attended a brand's broadcast to observe how the hosts worked.
On the big screen she was once again cast as a princess — this time in Zheng Xiao-Long's The Story of Turandot (2021), where her co-star was Dylan Sprouse. An HKCinema review praised the film's fairy-tale opening. At the Chinese box office, the picture grossed less than three million dollars. Back when she was applying to the academy, Guan had said she wanted to play a spy. In Mr. & Mrs. Chen (2023), she played Zuo Shuantao, an intelligence agent working in Shanghai in 1940. In a conversation with Yangcheng Evening News, she explained that she had to show the same heroine in different guises — from an agent on a mission to the flirtatious young lady known at the trading firm. In the interrogation scene, the heroine's head was dunked into a vat of water. The director asked Guan to open her eyes underwater. The scene was shot take after take, and she also had to make sure not to spit out the fake blood too early.
Guan returned to daughter roles in 2024 in the family series Romance in the Alley (小巷人家). Her Zhuang Xiaoting grows up in a working-class neighbourhood of Suzhou, in a family where the son has far more rights than the daughter. To soften her own Beijing accent, Xiaotong listened every day to recordings of operas from southern China and to the speech of southern Chinese bloggers. According to her, she grew so used to watching herself that at the recording of a New Year's programme in Beijing she suddenly could not deliver a line with the usual Beijing ending.
For years, Guan and Lu Han wished each other happy birthday on Weibo. When the greetings failed to appear in 2025, Taiwan's Mirror Daily again reported rumors that they had broken up. There was no public response at the time. In January 2026, blogger Si Xiaodi started a new rumor — about Guan's romance with Wang Anyu, her co-star in the series about Suzhou families. On January 3, representatives for both actors denied the report and said they had gathered evidence of the rumor's spread. Guan's representatives also said they had brought in lawyers.
In 2026 came Our Dazzling Days, in which Guan again starred opposite Johnny Huang, her co-star in Oversize Love. Their characters grow up in a factory town in northeast China. Guan plays Yan Xiaodan, who has dreamed of going to sea since her school days. Her character's father is from Beijing and her mother from Shanghai, and the director loved the ease with which Guan shifted between the local dialect, Putonghua and the Shanghai dialect.
