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My Fair Princess: the 1998 drama a whole generation grew up on

A 44% viewership rating, a Golden Eagle Award, and a young cast of near-unknowns who became a generation's biggest stars — the show much of modern C-drama history quietly starts from.

1998 · CTV / Hunan TV · Zhao Wei, Ruby Lin, Alec Su, Fan Bingbing

Why this one

Every other drama on this site owes something to this one. My Fair Princess — adapted from a novel by Qiong Yao, the romance novelist whose work shaped Chinese-language popular fiction for decades — aired its first season in the spring of 1998 and became one of the most-watched television events in Chinese broadcast history: a rebroadcast on Beijing Cable TV that November averaged a 44% viewership rating, a number that essentially means most households with a television were watching. It won Best TV Series at the China TV Golden Eagle Awards the following year, and it made stars of a cast of young leads that was, at the time, mostly unknown — apart from Alec Su, already a household name from his years in the Taiwanese boy band Little Tigers.

The setup

The premise runs on mistaken identity: Xiaoyanzi, a scrappy commoner with no connection to the imperial family, gets swept into the Qianlong Emperor's court after being mistaken for his long-lost daughter — and instead of the show treating that as a problem to quietly resolve, it becomes the engine for two seasons of comic chaos, culture-clash humor, and, eventually, real family stakes once the deception can't hold. It's tonally looser than the palace dramas that came after it — Xiaoyanzi is defined by being loud, undisciplined, and completely unsuited to court etiquette, and the show finds most of its comedy in exactly that friction.

Note — Qiong Yao (琼瑶): the pen name of one of the most influential Chinese-language romance novelists of the 20th century, whose novels and adaptations shaped the emotional register — melodrama, longing, big swings of feeling — that a huge amount of Chinese television drama still works in, decades on. If a costume drama on this site ever feels unusually earnest about heartbreak, there's a decent chance that instinct traces back to her.

What a Chinese viewer already knows

For audiences who grew up with it, My Fair Princess isn't really evaluated as "a drama" anymore so much as a shared cultural reference point — the kind of show most people in its generation watched on loop during summer break reruns, whether they were fans of the genre or not. That ambient, inescapable familiarity is part of why it's remembered less for its plot mechanics and more for specific scenes, catchphrases, and the cast's real-life trajectories afterward.

Cast and crew worth knowing

Where to watch

Its echo outside China

My Fair Princess became a phenomenon well beyond the mainland almost immediately — widely sold across Asian markets and a hit across Hong Kong, South Korea, and Southeast Asia within its first year. Nearly every actor in its young, then-unknown cast went on to become one of the biggest names of their generation in Chinese entertainment, which means watching it now doubles as watching the exact moment several major careers started.

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My Fair Princess: the 1998 drama a whole generation grew up on — C Drama.Fans