Eternal Love: the 50-billion-view xianxia romance that came before The Untamed

2017 · Zhejiang TV / Dragon TV · Yang Mi, Mark Chao

Why this one

Before The Untamed became the standard answer to "where do I start with C-drama," this was. Eternal Love — based on Tang Qi Gong Zi's 2015 novel of the same name — aired for just a month in early 2017 and kept climbing anyway: by August 2018 it had passed 50 billion views, a number contemporary coverage described as making it the most-watched television series in the world, full stop, not just within the genre.

The setup

The story runs on reincarnation as structure, not just theme: Bai Qian and Ye Hua's romance plays out across multiple lifetimes, identities, and memory-loss resets, with the two leads — Yang Mi and Mark Chao — playing multiple versions of essentially the same two souls throughout. It's a demanding structure for newcomers (keeping track of which lifetime, which name, which memories are currently active takes real attention), but it's also the show's core appeal: the sense that this pairing is fated across every version of the story the show is willing to tell.

注 Immortal-realm hierarchy: Xianxia shows typically organize their supernatural characters into tiers — mortals, immortals, and high gods, roughly — with romantic and political stakes often turning on characters from different tiers being together at all. Eternal Love's central couple spans exactly this kind of gap, which is part of why their reunions keep getting interrupted by cosmic-scale consequences rather than ordinary court politics.

What a Chinese viewer already knows

The novel had already built a massive readership before the adaptation existed, which meant the show arrived with built-in appointment-viewing energy rather than needing to build an audience from nothing — a pattern worth knowing because it recurs across a lot of the genre's biggest hits, including several others on this site.

Cast and crew worth knowing

• Yang Mi as Bai Qian / Su Su / Si Yin

• Mark Chao as Ye Hua / Zhao Ge / Mo Yuan

• Dilraba Dilmurat as Bai Fengjiu

• Gao Weiguang as Dong Hua

• 58 episodes, based on the 2015 novel by Tang Qi Gong Zi

Where to watch

• Viki — English subtitles, subscription tiers

• YouTube — official channel uploads in some regions

• WeTV — English subtitles

Its echo outside China

Ask an overseas C-drama fan who's been watching for more than five years what got them into the genre, and there's a real chance the answer predates The Untamed entirely and lands here instead. The viewership numbers are part of the story, but so is the timing: this was one of the shows that proved a xianxia romance could become a genuine global phenomenon, years before the rest of the industry started explicitly chasing that outcome.