12 C-dramas about forbidden love for when you want maximum yearning

Few romantic premises arrive with quite as much built-in anguish as Till the End of the Moon. Li Susu (Bai Lu), an immortal cultivator tasked with preventing the apocalyptic rise of the Devil God, travels 500 years into the past and inhabits the body of Ye Xiwu, the mortal wife of Tantai Jin (Luo Yunxi). At this point in his life, Tantai Jin is an abused hostage prince who has endured relentless cruelty and suspicion. Li Susu knows the tyrant he is destined to become, but the young man she encounters is also shaped by trauma and denied the basic warmth of human connection.

Her mission demands that she stop Tantai Jin from becoming the Devil God, even if that means killing him before his power fully awakens. Her growing empathy makes carrying out that mission increasingly difficult. The forbidden love is structured around a tragic contradiction: the more intimately she understands his pain, the harder it becomes to treat him as a monstrous destiny. Yet affection cannot simply erase the threat he represents, forcing both into a devastating clash between moral duty and desperate attachment.

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In The Journey of Flower, Zhao Liying stars as Hua Qiangu, an orphaned cultivator who enters Mount Changliu and becomes the sole disciple of Bai Zihua (Wallace Huo), a powerful immortal and one of the cultivation world’s leading figures. Their relationship begins with a clear imbalance of responsibility: he is her master, tasked with guiding her cultivation, while she looks to him for protection and instruction.

As Hua Qiangu’s attachment deepens into romantic love, their bond comes into conflict with the rules and expectations governing their master–disciple relationship. Bai Zihua must reconcile his duty to the cultivation world with his feelings for the woman whose fate he is repeatedly forced to confront. What begins as a teacher–student bond grows into a tragedy shaped by loyalty, punishment and sacrifice.

At the centre of Ashes of Love is Jin Mi (Yang Zi), daughter of the late Flower Deity, who is given the magical Unfeeling Pill at birth to prevent her from experiencing romantic love. When she encounters Xu Feng (Deng Lun), the Fire Deity and second son of the Heavenly Emperor, their growing attachment unfolds amid court rivalries and old betrayals.

Xu Feng’s devotion to Jin Mi is complicated by the machinations of his elder half-brother, Run Yu (Luo Yunxi), whose own feelings for Jin Mi turn a romantic rivalry into a struggle for power. As the conflict between the heavenly and demonic worlds escalates, Jin Mi must confront the gap between what she has been taught to feel and what she actually experiences.

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In Love and Redemption, Cheng Yi plays Yu Sifeng, a gifted disciple of Lize Palace, opposite Yuan Bingyan as Chu Xuanji, the daughter of a prominent cultivation sect leader. Xuanji is born without the six senses, leaving her unable to experience the world in the same way as those around her and struggling to understand romantic attachment.

Sifeng falls deeply in love with her, but his feelings are tested by the rules of his sect, the punishments he suffers and the supernatural mask associated with his identity. As Xuanji’s past gradually comes to light, she discovers that her connection to Sifeng is bound up with an ancient conflict between the heavenly and demonic realms. Their romance becomes a question of whether two people can break a cycle of resentment and sacrifice that has shaped their lives across multiple lifetimes.

The Blue Whisper begins with a power imbalance designed for heartbreak. Ji Yunhe (Dilraba Dilmurat), a gifted spirit master living under the control of the people who govern Wanhua Valley, is ordered to tame Chang Yi (Ren Jialun), a captured merman prince. Her task is to make him speak, surrender his tail and swear obedience.

Instead, Ji Yunhe grows attached to Chang Yi and tries to protect him from the system holding them both captive. Her attempts to help him come at a cost: deception and competing loyalties undermine their trust, turning their romance into a story of separation and painful reunion. The relationship raises an uncomfortable question about what devotion means when one person has been ordered to control the other and neither is truly free to choose their circumstances.

In The Longest Promise, Xiao Zhan plays Shi Ying, the Crown Prince of Kongsang who is presumed dead and eventually becomes a high priest on Mount Jiuyi. Ren Min plays Zhu Yan, a spirited princess of the Crimson Clan whose fate becomes tied to his through a prophecy that foretells his death.

Their relationship develops into a master-disciple bond, placing personal attachment in conflict with Shi Ying’s responsibilities and the political tensions threatening Kongsang. The prophecy casts a shadow over their growing feelings, making each encounter more complicated than a straightforward romance between a teacher and his student. Shi Ying must also contend with his religious duties and the consequences of allowing personal desire to influence decisions that affect the wider world.

Unlike the fantasy deities on this list of C-dramas about forbidden love, the protagonists of One and Only are crushed by human politics. Bai Lu stars as Cui Shiyi, a noble daughter sent to the manor of Prince Nan Chen, while Ren Jialun portrays Zhou Shengchen, a celebrated general whose military standing makes him a sensitive figure at court.

Their bond deepens through quiet companionship, battlefield loyalty and unspoken understanding. Yet Zhou Shengchen’s oath against marriage and Shiyi’s arranged betrothal to the crown prince leave little room for a future together. Their feelings are constrained not by a supernatural curse but by the obligations attached to their positions, with every personal choice carrying political consequences.

In Ancient Love Poetry, Zhou Dongyu stars as Shang Gu, the leader of the four true gods, while Xu Kai plays Bai Jue, a fellow deity who has loved her across millennia. When Shang Gu sacrifices her soul to stop the apocalyptic Tribulation of Chaos, she is lost to the world for 60,000 years, eventually reincarnating without any memory of their shared past.

Bai Jue’s devotion survives the decades of separation, but bringing Shang Gu back and shielding her from future doom comes at a devastating personal cost. Their romance is shaped by divine duty and extreme sacrifice: while she navigates a new life stripped of her memories, Bai Jue spends tens of thousands of years orchestrating a plan to bear her fatal destiny himself, testing how much one god is willing to give up to secure a future for the person he loves.

Yang Zi stars as Yan Dan, a lotus spirit born as one of a pair of Four-Leaf Lotus twins, opposite Cheng Yi as Ying Yuan, a powerful lord of the Heavenly Realm. Their relationship develops in a celestial world where attachment carries serious consequences, forcing them to negotiate the distance between their feelings and the duties imposed on them.

Yan Dan’s willingness to sacrifice part of her heart to save Ying Yuan becomes one of the defining tragedies of their relationship. After separation and painful misunderstandings, their story continues through mortal identities and encounters that test whether they can recognise and choose each other again. Rather than a single forbidden romance, Immortal Samsara builds its yearning around repeated separation, sacrifice and the struggle to overcome the rules of the world they inhabit.

In Back From the Brink, Hou Minghao plays Tian Yao, a dragon spirit betrayed by Su Ying, the woman he was to marry, who dismembers and seals him across the world. Zhou Ye plays Yan Hui, an exiled cultivator whose heart contains a dragon scale linked to his survival.

Their relationship begins with mutual need: Tian Yao requires Yan Hui’s help to recover his scattered body parts, while she has her own reasons to remain involved. As they navigate the hostility between cultivation sects and spirit demons, their uneasy alliance grows into a bond built on trust, protection and shared risk. What begins as a practical arrangement gradually becomes a romance that forces both characters to reconsider the prejudices and loyalties they have inherited.

Scarlet Heart anchors its time-travel premise in the ruthless historical reality of the Qing court. Liu Shishi stars as Zhang Xiao, a modern woman whose consciousness enters the body of Ma’ertai Ruoxi during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor.

Surrounded by the imperial princes, Ruoxi becomes romantically involved with the Eighth Prince (Kevin Cheng) and later the Fourth Prince, the future Yongzheng Emperor (Nicky Wu). Armed with knowledge of the history that awaits the Qing princes, Ruoxi tries to navigate the court’s shifting alliances, even as her feelings draw her deeper into the succession struggle. Her romances become inseparable from the political decisions that shape the princes’ lives and the future of the dynasty.

For Ruoxi, knowing what history holds does not mean she can change it. The knowledge that once seemed like an advantage becomes a source of dread as she watches the people she loves move towards outcomes she struggles to prevent.

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