Against the Current: a disgraced noblewoman takes a dead servant's name

2026 · Tencent Video (exclusive), CCTV drama channel · Tan Songyun (谭松韵), Liu Xueyi (刘学义)

This piece was written in the first weeks of the show's run. It covers the premise and production, not the ending, and will be revisited once the series has finished airing.

Why this one

Against the Current (兰香如故) premiered on September 11, 2026, on Tencent Video, which holds the exclusive domestic streaming rights, and it is also being shown on the CCTV drama channel, with Disney+ and WeTV carrying it internationally. It runs 47 episodes of about 45 minutes each. It is the newest title in this column, which is why it is worth covering now: this is a chance to look at a drama's opening rather than at a finished, settled reputation.

The setup

Shen Jialan is the granddaughter of a senior minister of the Grand Secretariat (内阁). Her family is destroyed when her grandfather is falsely accused of treason. Her engagement to Lin Jinqi, the grandson of the Minister of Personnel, is broken off by the Lin family, who want to protect themselves and marry into a more influential house instead.

She survives because a family who used to serve hers helps her escape. They have her take the identity of their dead daughter, Xu Lanxiang, and she enters the Lin household as a servant. According to published synopses, she gradually earns respect through intelligence and integrity while uncovering the conspiracy that destroyed her family. The drama's title is a play on the name she has to live under: 兰香如故 can be read as "Lanxiang, as ever," a name that stays the same even as the person wearing it changes.

注 The hidden-identity maid: Disguise as a servant is one of the oldest engines in Chinese costume drama, because it lets a highborn heroine be placed at the bottom of a household hierarchy while keeping her education, her manners, and her secrets. The interesting variable in any version is what the disguise costs. Here the heroine's new employers are the family that abandoned her, which raises the emotional stakes of every ordinary domestic scene.

Cast and crew worth knowing

• Tan Songyun (谭松韵) as Xu Lanxiang / Shen Jialan.

• Liu Xueyi (刘学义) as Lin Jinqi.

• Directed by Huang Yingxiang (黄颖湘) and Chen Dan (陈丹), from a screenplay credited to Tong Hua and Xiao Lou.

• Adapted from the novel 兰香缘 (Lanxiang Yuan) by He Yanshan.

Where to watch

• Tencent Video and CCTV-8 in China

• WeTV and Disney+ internationally

• As of September 25, 2026: 47 episodes, still airing.

What to watch for

Because the show is still airing, the useful questions are structural rather than evaluative. How long the series keeps the disguise in place is the first: it determines whether the story is about a woman hiding, or about a woman rebuilding while hidden. The second is how the show distributes its attention between the household politics in the Lin family and the larger political conspiracy behind her grandfather's fall. Dramas that combine an inner-household plot with a court plot often struggle to balance the two, and Against the Current has 47 episodes in which to try.