Pursuit of Jade has a lot to answer for. Since sweeping across streaming platforms in 2026 and racking up billions of views, the historical romance starring Zhang Ling He and Tian Xi Wei has recalibrated what audiences are willing to settle for. 40 episodes of watching two people fall in love across battlefields will do that to a person, and somehow everything else starts to feel a little flat afterwards.
Part of what made it so hard to shake was that no single thing carried the show. The leads had chemistry that felt genuinely unscripted and the cinematography belonged in a museum. The marriage-of-convenience premise kept viewers in a state of drawn-out, entirely voluntary suffering for weeks on end. And running beneath all the longing glances and layered silk robes was actual substance: political scheming, revenge plots and emotional stakes that earned their payoff. It was not just pretty. It was good, reallyy good.
For many viewers, Pursuit of Jade was also the entry point into Chinese drama as a genre altogether. It is the kind of series that promises you one historical romance and delivers a completely new set of interests you did not ask for and cannot explain to anyone who has not seen it. The yearning, the visuals, the male lead who suffers handsomely and says very little: once you have acquired a taste for it, ordinary television starts to feel like a significant downgrade.
So if you have finished all 40 episodes and are now staring at your screen wondering what to do with yourself, you are in very good company. The Chinese dramas on this list have been chosen because each one captures something of what made Pursuit of Jade work, whether that is a slow-burn romance built on impossible circumstances, a world that looks extraordinary, or two leads who are very clearly in love and doing absolutely nothing about it. Consider this guide your prescription for the withdrawal.
(Hero and feature images credit: iQIYI)
10 Romantic Chinese dramas to binge next if you liked ‘Pursuit of Jade’
1 /10
Go Ahead (2020)Cast: Song Wei Long, Tan Song Yun, Zhang Xin Cheng, Tu Song Yan, Zhang Xi Lin, He Rui Xian, Yang Tong Shu
Episodes: 40
Not every drama on this list will scratch the romantic itch directly, but Go Ahead earns its place because Pursuit of Jade was never really just about the romance. It was about people choosing each other under difficult circumstances, and that is precisely what this family drama does so well.
The story centres on three teenagers, Ling Xiao, He Zi Qiu and Li Jian Jian, who grow up sharing a home despite having no blood ties. What they build together is messier and more honest than any conventional family portrait, shaped by abandonment, mental health struggles and the particular grief of parents who let their children down. Yet it never tips into misery. The drama earns every warm moment because it has done the emotional groundwork to justify it.
Fun fact: Go Ahead was popular enough to inspire a Korean remake, Family by Choice, in 2024.
Watch it here2 /10
Legend of the Female General (2025)Cast: Zhou Ye, Ryan Cheng, Zhang Miao Yi, Li Qing, Bai Shu, Zhang Zhi Xi
Episodes: 36
If what kept you watching Pursuit of Jade was Fan Chang Yu holding her own in a world built to sideline her, Legend of the Female General is the logical next step. Zhou Ye plays He Yan, a young noblewoman who assumes her ailing brother’s military identity to preserve her family’s standing. She becomes a celebrated general, only to be cast aside by the very people she sacrificed everything to protect.
What follows is a story of reinvention and revenge, with He Yan re-enlisting under a new name and finding herself alongside General Xiao Jue, a man who is convinced she is hiding something and is absolutely right. The slow unravelling of his suspicion into something closer to respect, and eventually much more than that, is where the drama really finds its footing. Like Pursuit of Jade, it places a capable woman at the centre of military conflict and lets the romance develop through shared danger rather than grand declarations.
Watch it here3 /10
The Prisoner of Beauty (2025)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJaSX3IPFy8
Cast: Song Zu Er, Liu Yu Ning, Xuan Lu, Liu Duan Duan, Wu Hao Chen, Liu Yi Hong, Chu Zi Jun
Episodes: 36
Set against a backdrop loosely inspired by the Three Kingdoms period, The Prisoner of Beauty leans hard into the enemies-to-lovers setup and somehow makes it feel fresh. The opening episodes establish war, betrayal and old grudges, but the drama quickly reveals what it is actually interested in: two people with every reason to distrust each other, slowly and reluctantly becoming the only person the other can rely on.
The female lead, Qiao Man Man, is the kind of heroine Pursuit of Jade viewers will take to immediately. She is calculating and clear-headed, always three moves ahead, and never willing to let anyone see how much things cost her. Opposite her, General Wei Shao starts out cold and formidable, and his gradual softening is genuinely earned rather than rushed. The political intrigue takes a back seat to the relationship itself, and the drama is all the better for knowing its own priorities.
Watch it here4 /10
Love Between Fairy and Devil (2022)Cast: Esther Yu, Dylan Wang, Zhang Ling He, Xu Hai Qiao, Cristy Guo, Charles Lin
Episodes: 36
Pursuit of Jade fans will spot a familiar face here immediately. Zhang Ling He appears as the second male lead, which is either a comfort or a form of emotional torment depending on how attached you became to Xie Zheng. But Love Between Fairy and Devil has more than nostalgia going for it.
Starring Esther Yu and Dylan Wang, the drama follows a fairy who becomes bound to a feared demon lord through circumstances neither of them chose. What develops between them is shaped by conflict, self-sacrifice and the kind of loyalty that sneaks up on both characters before they have time to resist it. The fantasy setting trades the snow-covered battlefields of Pursuit of Jade for an entirely different world, but the emotional architecture is remarkably similar: two people from opposing sides, tethered together, slowly realising that the arrangement has become something they cannot walk away from.
Watch it here5 /10
Blossoms in Adversity (2024)Cast: Zhang Jing Yi, Hu Yi Tian, Caesar Wu, Lu Yu Xiao, Bian Cheng, Myolie Wu, He Lei
Episodes: 40
The premise of Blossoms in Adversity will feel familiar to anyone who spent 40 episodes watching Fan Chang Yu refuse to be defeated. Zhang Jing Yi plays Hua Zhi, a young woman who suddenly finds herself responsible for holding her entire family together after the men of the household are sent into exile. She has no roadmap and very little margin for error, and watching her figure it out is extremely satisfying.
The romance develops between Hua Zhi and a prince, played by Hu Yi Tian, whose protectiveness gradually shades into something more equal and more honest. Like Pursuit of Jade, the relationship earns its weight because both characters are carrying real burdens, and love becomes less a luxury than a form of survival. The drama is slightly softer in tone and more domestically focused than Pursuit of Jade, but it shares the same core appeal of a woman who refuses to break, a man who slowly understands what she is worth, and enough gorgeous costumes to make every difficult scene feel like a painting.
Watch it here6 /10
Love Like the Galaxy (2022)Cast: Leo Wu, Zhao Lu Si, Zeng Li, Li Yun Rui, Yu Cheng En, Gao He Yuan, Guo Tao
Episodes: 56
If the scale of Pursuit of Jade was part of what got you hooked, the feeling that the romance was happening inside a much bigger, more dangerous world, then Love Like the Galaxy is built for you. At 56 episodes, it is genuinely epic, and it earns every one of them.
Zhao Lusi plays Cheng Shao Shang, a young woman who spent her childhood feeling invisible within her own family and grows over the course of the series, into someone who can no longer be overlooked. Wu Lei plays the general she falls for. He is brilliant, emotionally guarded and carrying the kind of past that explains everything about him without excusing any of it. The drama is funny and devastating in roughly equal measure, the supporting characters are as fully realised as the leads, and the romance unfolds against a backdrop of wars, court politics and family betrayals that feel genuinely consequential. Much like Pursuit of Jade, it understands that a love story hits differently when the entire world seems determined to keep the two people apart.
7 /10
My Journey to You (2023)Cast: Esther Yu, Zhang Ling He, Ryan Cheng, Lu Yu Xiao, Jolin Jin, Sun Chen Jun
Episodes: 24
Zhang Ling He is back, and this time he is the lead. If Pursuit of Jade gave you a particular weakness for his brand of steadfastness, My Journey to You offers 24 episodes of it in a setting that is, if anything, even moodier.
Esther Yu plays an assassin who infiltrates a powerful aristocratic family under false pretences, tasked with completing a mission that requires her to get close to the very people she is meant to destroy. What she does not account for is becoming genuinely entangled with them. The drama is darker than Pursuit of Jade, with a visual palette that favours deep shadows and forests that look permanently shrouded in mist. The moral ambiguity runs throughout, and no one is entirely who they appear to be. For viewers who loved Pursuit of Jade‘s atmosphere of beautiful people making terrible decisions for understandable reasons, this is the next Chinese drama to binge on.
Watch it here8 /10
Perfect Match (2025)Cast: Lu Yu Xiao, Wang Xing Yue, Liu Xie Ning, Wu Xuan Yi, Ke Ying, Huangyang Tian Tian, Winwin
Episodes: 36
Perfect Match operates at a slightly different emotional register to Pursuit of Jade, it is warmer, lighter and with a comedic streak that the latter largely kept in check. But both are fundamentally about women navigating a world that has given them limited options, and finding ways to turn constraint into something resembling agency.
Set during the Song Dynasty, the series follows a widowed matriarch who moves her family to a new city and takes it upon herself to find suitable marriages for her five daughters. Each daughter brings her own personality and complications, and the ensemble format means there is always something, or someone, to invest in. It ranked third on Netflix’s official list of most-watched Chinese-language dramas in 2025, with three million views globally, which suggests that Pursuit of Jade is not the only historical drama with a gift for making matchmaking feel high-stakes.
9 /10
Story of Kunning Palace (2023)Cast: Bai Lu, Zhang Ling He, Wang Xing Yue, Zhou Jun Wei, Liu Xie Ning, Elisa Ye, Tang Meng Jia
Episodes: 38
For anyone whose Pursuit of Jade withdrawal is specifically about missing Zhang Ling He in elaborate period costume, Story of Kunning Palace is the most direct remedy on this list. He plays Xie Wei, a court official whose intelligence is matched only by his capacity for deliberate manipulation, a very different character from Xie Zheng but no less compelling to watch.
The heroine, Jiang Xue Ning, is granted a second life after dying in disgrace and uses it to try to avoid the fate she already knows is coming for her. The complication, naturally, is that avoiding her fate means navigating around the very man who caused it. The drama is psychologically darker than Pursuit of Jade, with a romance that is built on wariness and history rather than longing and proximity.
Watch it here10 /10
You Are My Glory (2021)Cast: Yang Yang, Dilraba Dilmurat, Hu Ke, Pan Yue Ming, Wang Yan Lin, Sun Ya Li
Episodes: 32
After eight historical dramas, You Are My Glory offers something a bit different. A contemporary romance set in the present day, with no court politics, no elaborate robes and no one dying on a battlefield. And yet the emotional core of it will feel very familiar to Pursuit of Jade viewers.
Dilraba Dilmurat plays Qiao Jing Jing, a celebrity whose carefully managed public image begins to crack when a video surfaces revealing that she is genuinely terrible at the mobile game she endorses. Her solution is to find someone to coach her privately, and that someone turns out to be her former secondary school crush, Yu Tu, now an aerospace engineer with an unexpected talent for gaming. What begins as a practical arrangement between two people with something to gain slowly becomes something neither of them quite planned for. There are no dramatic betrayals or political conspiracies here, just two adults who genuinely like and respect each other, figuring out whether that is enough to build something on. After the emotional rollercoaster of Pursuit of Jade, this is a comfortable place to land on next.
Watch it hereNote : The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.