The director, who is from Chiba prefecture near Tokyo, first came to China to produce a three-episode documentary A Journey to the Yangtze River for Japanese public broadcaster NHK in 2010. Despite being unable to speak Chinese, he developed a passion and curiosity to explore Chinese society and since 2013, he has been living in Nanjing in Jiangsu province.

Now a fluent Mandarin speaker, he and his wife, Zhao Ping, a Nanjing native, have co-founded a company, and have produced a series of documentaries that show China and Chinese people from a foreigner's perspective, among them films like The Reason I Live Here (2015) and Long Time No See, Wuhan (2020).

The Yangtze River, which the witty director humorously refers to as a tribute to his mother-in-law, given its status in China as the country's "mother river", enabled Takeuchi to fulfill his decadelong dream of retracing the route along the river, which runs for just over 6,300 kilometers in length.

The driving force behind the new documentary was his desire to visit the place where, in his own words, he could see "the first drop of the Yangtze River" emerge — the glacial meltwaters of the Tangula Mountains on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau.