If you are a fan of Chinese webnovels, you must be familiar with the transmigration genre.
This is when the main character finds himself/herself transported into a fictional world such as a book, drama, game and so on.
It also covers stories in which the protagonist inhabits an existing person’s body across different time periods.
Perhaps the most famous Korean drama which carries a transmigration type of plot is Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo.
In the drama, Go Ha-jin (Lee Ji-eun) from the 21st century finds herself in the body of Hae Soo in the year 941.
As for C-dramas, here are KajoMag’s choices of 10 Chinese transmigration dramas you need to watch:
1.The Eternal Love (2017)
As if being transmigrated into another person’s body was not complicated enough, in this story the main character’s body switches back and forth between two souls.
Set in the ancient China, Qu Tan Er (Liang Jie) is the second daughter of the Qu family.
She is in love with the king’s oldest son, Mo Yi Huai (Wang Rui Chang).
Unfortunately, she is being forced to marry, Yi Huai’s younger brother, Mo Lian Cheng (Xing Zhao Lin), the eighth prince of the Dong Yue Kingdom.
Unhappy with the forced marriage, Tan Er tries to commit suicide, only to wake up from her failed attempt with the spirit of another woman also taking up residence in her body.
The modern Xiao Tan (also played by Liang Jie) has the opposite personality of Tan Er, cheerful and assertively strong.
She is stuck in the past world and has so far been unsuccessful in her attempts to find a way back to the modern time.
Whenever one of the women tells a lie, the other personality takes over the body.
To complicate the situation, Lian Chen falls in love with the vivacious Xiao Tan.
The drama is an adaptation of Fan Lai’s popular novel ‘Laugh Favourite Concubine: Sir, I Wait for You to Divorce Me’.
Yes, it is quite a mouthful for a title of a novel. It is no surprise in the drama adaptation is simply called ‘The Eternal Love’.
2.Cinderella Chef (2018)
This drama follows the story of Ye Jia Yao (Zhong Dan Ni) is a chef who runs a mobile diner in the modern day.
One day, a dejected young man comes in one day and asks her to cook his last meal.
Apparently, he plans to take his life that night. As it turns out, the man is devastated that his professor has stolen all of his data for a time machine that he built.
The man then brings Jia Yao to his lab to show her his time machine. An incident happens in the lab and Jia Yao is catapulted back to ancient times.
There, Jia Yao finds herself in the body of Ye Jin Xuan who is the daughter of a magistrate.
The moment she wakes up, she is suddenly kidnapped to Hei Fang Camp where she meets the leader of the bandits Xia Chun Yu.
He is the former master of the Jing An Marquis manor. One thing leads to another, the two get engaged in a fake marriage.
Like many fake marriages in the drama world, both of them starts to fall for each other.
3.Princess at Large (2018)
This Chinese transmigration drama follows the story of Ji Xian Yun (Yang An Qi) who is preparing for her career as a doctor.
However one day, she is transported back to the ancient times and finds herself in the body of a powerful minister’s daughter at the Imperial Court.
The moment she is transmigrated, the minister’s daughter has just survived a suicide attempt.
Her parents are forcing her to marry the Emperor’s favourite son, Prince Ming or Qi Ling Xiao (Sheng Ying Hao).
Despite being the favourite son, Prince Ming is suffering from mysterious illness.
As Ji Xian Yun is looking her way to return to the modern times, the minister’s family is pushing the marriage ahead.
After being forced to go through the wedding, Ji strikes a deal with Prince Ming. If she can cure him from his mysterious sickness, the prince will divorce her.
Being transmigrated from the modern era, Ji is definitely not a weak princess in this drama and that makes the whole series fun to watch.
4.Joy of Life (2019)
Based on the webnovel Qing Yu Nian by Mao Ni, Joy of Life (2019) follows the story of Fan Xian (Zhang Ruo Yun).
He is born in the ancient empire of Southern Qing with memories of the 21st century.
He lives in a rural town as the illegitimate son of the Minister of Finance, raised by his grandmother.
His mother, Ye Qing Mei, was once a celebrated inventor and the founder of the Overwatch Department, the country’s spy network but was killed shortly after her son was born.
Fan Xian has since been protected by a blind martial arts expert, Wu Zhu, his mother’s bodyguard.
He learned martial arts and the art of poison as a child, also assisted by his knowledge from the 21st century.
After an assassination attempt, he decides to venture into the capital to find out more about his mysterious mother and why anyone would want to kill him, as he perceives himself to be an unimportant person.
He also wants to know why he has memories of a sharply different era. In the capital, he accidentally meets Lin Wan Er (Li Qin) the sickly illegitimate daughter of Princess Royal, and falls in love with her.
Unbeknownst to him, she is the woman the emperor chose for him to marry so that he would be the new overseer of the Royal Treasury, an institute Fan Xian’s mother established in the palace and currently handled by Princess Royal.
In the capital, however, he gets entangled in the Imperial Court conflict as well as in the Overwatch Department.
The drama garnered high viewership and mostly positive reviews for its comedic elements and logical story flow. It won two awards at the Shanghai Television Festival including Best Adapted Screenplay.
5.My Heroic Husband (2021)
This Chinese transmigration drama is adapted from the novel Zhui Xu by Fen Nu de Xiang Jiao.
It follows the story of a successful entrepreneur in modern-day China.
Due to some business dispute, his former business partner has him brutally beaten.
When he awakes, he has transmigrated back in time hundreds of years and now inhabits the body of a young man named Ning Yi (Guo Qi Lin).
He immediately discovers that he is engaged into the family of a successful cloth merchant and will become a matrilocal husband.
Even though at first he is reluctant to get married, things change after he meets his fiancee Su Tan Er (Song Yi).
Ning Yi changes his mind and the couple ties the knot.
After their wedding, Ning Yi discovers some of the problems of his in-laws’ cloth merchant business.
Using his modern day business skill, Ning Yi helps the family’s business to grow.
6.Love Better Than Immortality (2020)
How about a Chinese transmigration story with some love triangle drama?
The plot starts in the year 2196 when technology has advanced so much that was once considered extraordinary has now become ordinary.
For example being immortal has now become a normal thing.
Humans can even experience different life through virtual reality program.
However, Chun Hua (Zhao Lu Si) wants more than virtual reality. She yearns to experience true love.
Hence, Chun Hua agrees to participate in a VR program called Tianlei System where she can transmigrate into a different world to find true love in exchange for her immortality.
After waking up in a world of martial arts, Chun Hua is caught between the love of two men; the arrogant and aggressive Qie Yue (Li Hong Yi) and the kind and gentle Xiao Bai (June Wu).
Both men are mortal enemies and are different as night and day, yet both falling in love with the same woman, Chun Hua.
Like many drama on this list, this series is based on the novel of the same name by Shu Ke.
7.Mr Bad (2022)
If you are looking for something light and sweet to watch, this is the C-drama for you.
The plot follows the life of Nan Xing (Shen Yue) who works an online novel writer.
In the novel she wrote, her main character is based on her favourite idol Lu Zi Chen (Luo Ming Jie) while his main antoganist is Xiao Wu Di (Chen Zhe Yuan). He is a cunning and manipulative martial artist.
One day, after making a wish for an ‘unforgettable love’ in a Fairy Pool.
To her surprise, Xiao Wu Di who is the villain of her novel appears before her.
She tries to avoid him but Xiao Wu Di keeps on threatening her into taking care of him.
After awhile, Nan Xing realises that she develops a special power; whenever she needs help, Xiao Wu Di would teleports next to her to fulfill her wish.
8.Dance of the Phoenix (2020)
In modern-day China, a quiet, shy young female student named Meng Yuan (Yang Chao Yue) works hard at her dream of becoming a leading practitioner of Chinese traditional medicine.
But on one fateful day, she finds herself transported into the body of a woman named Feng Wu who lives in a fantasy land where magic and martial arts rule the world.
Feng Wu is forced into a marriage with a prince named Jun Lin Yuan (Xu Kai Cheng), who also resents the fact that his bride has been selected for him against his will.
Meng Yuan soon discovers that if she is to make her life as Feng Wu a success, she will have to learn how to defend herself against danger and make powerful friends.
Fortunately, she soon discovers that her knowledge of Chinese traditional medicine will be invaluable here and will help her treat the ailments of her newfound friends.
9.The Romance of a Tiger and a Rose (2020)
Overall, this Chinese transmigration drama is cute and enjoyable to watch.
But what we love the most about it is how the drama plays around the idea of stereotypical gender roles.
Chen Xiao Qian (Zhao Lu Si) is a struggling screenwriter who has never been in love before.
Her script was finally being picked up but the filming has been delayed because the main actor Han Ming Xing (Ding Yu Xi) questioned a lot about the storyline.
The next day, she finds herself being transmigrated into her own script in the body of the third princess of Dong Liang named Chen Qian Qian.
Dong Liang is a unique country where females dominate and males are perceived to be the weaker species that need to be protected.
Since she knows the storyline of her script, she knows that her character Princess Chen Qian Qian is a supportive character that soon to be killed in the third episode by the male lead character Prince Han Shuo.
Prince Han Shuo is from the neighbouring country where the gender roles are conservatives and are opposite of Dong Liang’s.
On top of that, Han Shuo looks exactly like Han Ming Xing who is the actor in Chen Xiao Qian’s drama.
Being in her own drama, Chen’s goal is simple which is trying to find her way back home while avoiding being killed by the male lead.
10.The Player (2022)
This Chinese transmigration drama follow the story of Lu Ren Jia (Zhang Yun Long) who lives a lonely life.
After being abandoned by his mother as a child, he lost all trust in other people and became an almost reclusive.
He has shunned society, but has also taught himself a range of IT-related skills, transforming himself into something of a tech whizz.
His daily existence is dull and relatively uneventful until he discovers the latest gaming craze, an AI-based game named 5W.
5W becomes a massive phenomenon in the gaming world, pitting humans against one another and artificial intelligence, allowing them to interact with one another and aid or harm each other in the battle to gain ultimate transcendence.
In this online arena, Lu Ren Jia meets Zhou Zhi Shu (Deng Jia Jia), a beautiful and kind-hearted kindergarten teacher with some mysterious secrets of her own.
Her former boyfriend introduced Zhou Zhi Shu into the virtual world of 5W.
Because of a bug, a group of gamers get transmigrated into the game and the border between reality and the gaming world begins to blur.
