AleksandraSucur

Eeeh, easy peasy when we know how it ended 😂
But GPY has no clue of what is happening around him. In the moment they've taken separate roads, the capital of Anhui, Hefei, is under Li Cheng's (military) command. He can't know the future. Even later, when he learnt Hefei is under siege, he still enters the city convinced Li Cheng has a chance to retreat to another Taiping city/lord, lol.
His naivety, kindness and humanity are very similar to his mother's (the story of her wedding dress, omg)... I'd like him to act more like his f....., hm, like a person who gave a sound lesson to his gentle scholarly view of the world regarding money, persons and... power, ofc. But we have to patiently await for that jump and watch the next eps.
As for your friend... I totally understand why she laughed. I've almost lost my life 25-30 y ago, in a CAR with a front-wheel drive (comparable to the horse anterior drive but much more powerful and with better, larger wheels) despite winter tires! The wind and fresh snow were so strong, only the reverse gear saved me. When I've seen the carriage (with wooden wheels) which brought GPY to that desolate hut I've started to feel uncomfortable. The same for the carriage transporting rifles: being heavier, it won't be blown away but it will remain stuck in the snow. Finally, I never tried dog sledding at Harbin (and envy a lot that experience), but I've tried horse sledding at Kitzbühel and have an idea why dogs are better than shod horses.
But the story is too gripping and I am willing to suspend my beliefs...

Definitely perfect for this role

It isn't explained in detail in the drama but it is largely implied the Qing rule is highly corrupted, unjust and generally unfit/careless to address even more basic problems of the people... and these are more or less sufficient reasons for a rebellion (actually, almost all rebellions in history and in the present of humankind start or started for the very same reasons).
If you want to know more about the real historical rebellion, it is sufficient to google "Taiping rebellion", it has its own peculiarities, you won't be annoyed reading about it. 😂

yup

you mean "gone with him" to Beijing or to Anhui? Bc, these are 2 different things. They came to Beijing to transport smth, it would be a waste of time going back there again. Going with him to Anhui wouldn't be smart, there's still a civil war in the region... Although his village is more or less "safe", it is still exposed to all sorts of troubles connected with the war (refuges, shortages of food and medicines, diseases...). The best (=safest) thing would be HIM returning with them to Shanxi, but he has his mother, dumb bro, other villagers... So, it's not just drama for the sake of drama, imo.
But I agree with you that the latest arc was different, with a lot of dramatic exaggerations replacing the "realistic" vibe of previous arcs... Ningguta in particular was... surreal but - for some reason - I've found this change of vibe... hilarious. Even the real life has a few surrealistic episodes, lol

😂😂👍 Having smth in common with Miao Renfeng makes him instantly more likeable, lol

I think that, too.
Besides, he doesn't want to drag her (or her dad) down, He didn't want that when they were in Shanxi (and he was still a fugitive), then he wasn't "brave enough" to make his own choice, going against the marriage arrangement (as he confessed to Yu'er) and now wants closure of other open issues before "coming to find her". It is not reluctance... it is prioritisation... first things first

Indeed

From his pov, it's probably better to die fighting Qing's corrupted officials/generals who only work for their own interest and profit and are totally unconcerned about the common people's sufferings.
Persons like him didn't rebel to be "princes" or gain profits (or for the ideas of the "heavenly king"), it was the injustice they've suffered and sheer desperation to push them to rebel and fight. When you are out of options to live a normal life, then fighting against people who left you with no options is a wortwhile fight.

from the trailers, it looks like she will be saved by GPY. She's pregnant

Ms Su abducted him, made him transported to Ningguta and handed to the crazy Xu. Xu is a derranged opium addict. He doesn't want to kill him instantly but to keep him alive in order to torture him as long as possible and in every possible way (freezing him, terrorizing him with wolves etc). He also knows he's a dying man and blames GPY for ruining his life (actually he was harshly punished for GPY's escape and maybe his bad - mental and physical - health has smth to do with that punishment), that's why he is so obsessed with GPY and his ultimate desire in life is to torture him as a way of taking revenge over a man he perceives as his bane.
Thus your question "why he accepted touring in Russia" is perfectly logical, but - given his state of mind - we can only imagine possible answers. I've explained it to myself in this way: he never moved from Ningguta area, never saw the world, never had a chance to imagine a better prospects (being a general! wow) for himself. Even his rifle - he lied about it, he didn't bought it accross the border but from a hunter passing by. To taste just a slice of the "outside" world before dying, how great that sensation must be! But once returned to his hut he remained without the drug which kept him going on (opium is a sedative, without it, he feels a lot of pain) and his derranged obsession to die taking GPY "to hell with him" returned.

I'm not an expert in guns but I've studied the history of warfare, that's why I have some general insight of the military equipment employed in different times and war theatres

Ms Su is an extremely dangerous & vengeful person but not stupid. Killing him in the capital - where he became incredibly popular with his tea and Cixi's public recognition - would imply a thorough investigation of all the people involved in tea competition, including her main partner LWT... that's why killing him by the hand of his Ningguta archenemy, far away from the capital, was safer. When she was investigating GPY before (when they were in Shanxi and GPY already made a faux-pas messing with her plans), she personally met with Xu and gave him the opium making him even more derranged than he naturally is. Just in case she needed to get rid of GPY one day.

A heroine riding a horse shooting arrows to save her mansel in distress... that's how you should enter the scene, girls! Yu'er, you are the one 👍

We see two different rifles in ep 20. The crazy corporal's is probably a Ferguson, Sharps or a rifle using M1867 breechloader (there were many variants depending on the country of production and the type of bullets used). GPY mentions breech loading. The weird Russian's rifle is different, it's definitely more sophisticated and modern, having a lateral reloading mechanism for a sliding block and expulsion of cartridges but it's difficult to figure out the exact model and the country of production because this type of rifle wasn't still in massive use by regular armies although the mechanism was invented and widely experimented at the time.

Oh, that one was so "wtf are they doing with their hands?" 😂😱

I was surprised as much as you. In general, hearing European languages in c-dramas seriously endangers my eardrums and this flaw is unforgivable (and unforgettable) when the drama in question is HQ and created with care for details, craftily and upon a solid historical research (eg. German in The War of Faith). Yes, the production evidently gathered enough solid Russian speakers to make it sound credible.

Definitely.
But such dances in the "saloons" didn't exist in the American "Wild West" either, it was a cinematographic invention of "spaghetti westerns" in '60-ties and '70-ies of the 20th century.
But, for some (probably artistic) reasons, I've liked the authors included this (mis)representation. To me, it looked like a homage (to the cinematograhic history).
From the historical pov, this ep totally failed to deliver the sense of realistic. 1. The script (I don't know for the novel) totally ignored two opium wars fought between Western powers and the Qing in the same timeline, focusing more on the internal strife with Taiping rebels (a harsh conflict, with 20-30 M of casualties, but was "minor" in order to understand the historical dynamics and the reasons of downfall of the Qing). The result of both opium wars was a huge territorial gain for Russian empire (who paradoxically acted as an afterwar "mediator"!) in Siberia, and in particular, the Russian empire gained not only the territories gained by the Qing as "Manchurians" - annexed as their "homeland" with parts of inner and outer Mongolia - but the reason why the Russians (who had their own problems) have done that was just to convince the Americans to purchase their colony Alaska (formally sold in 1859, but with lot of caveats and problems for both sides, so, another 100 years will pass to see Alaska as an American state. That's another story). 2. Ningguta is a Harbin's county of Ning'an. A harsh frozen place, "ideal for exiles", and the border (on Amur river) with Russian empire nearer from the time GPY was exiled to the timeline in ep 20. In real history, there was literally nothing at that frozen border, today stretching from Blagoveshensk to Kabarovsk. 3. the uniforms aren't totally false, black double breasted uniforms were in use in Russian... navy but this wasn't the case with the cossacks and regular soldiers on the frontier who wore normal "tsar green" uniforms.
But... from the artistic pov, I found this ep hilarious!

Back to the Far West of the Far Northeast of Qing!
Russian border trade town looks like a mix of American Far West, Caucasian-Kazakh cuisine (šašlyk) and people dressed in black, all looking like Ivan the Terrible.😂😂😂
Totally loved the surreal vibe (totally wrong colour of uniforms included) in ep 20, lol

I see. Thank you very much again. 🫶