Ashes of Love

We haven't watched this one. This section is based on English and Chinese Wikipedia, Chinese entertainment coverage and English-language reviews and recaps.

Ashes of Love is two dramas in one. The first stretch is a comedy: Jinmi is innocent to the point of absurdity, takes everything literally and keeps treating the proud Fire Deity as her personal servant. Fans often single out these episodes as the most rewatchable. The middle and late episodes turn much darker, with betrayal, revenge, a palace coup, a war between heaven and the demon realm and several deaths. Reviewers in English and Chinese tend to describe the tonal shift as the point of the show: the girl who couldn't feel love learns what it costs.

The love triangle is what people remember. Deng Lun's Xufeng is the hero, but Luo Yunxi's Runyu, the overlooked eldest prince who slowly darkens, became one of the most talked-about second leads in Chinese television. Discussions of the show on Chinese and English platforms still split into camps over Runyu, and some viewers say they finished it mainly for him. Yang Zi's comic performance in the first half was widely praised.

The complaints are mostly about length and the late plot. At 63 episodes, the drama is long, and some viewers felt the middle dragged. Others found Jinmi's naivety frustrating, or felt the final war and the resolution of the triangle were rushed after so much build-up. As with many big xianxia productions of its time, some of the effects work looks dated now.

For viewers coming from other fantasy dramas, it helps to know that Ashes of Love is one continuous story, not a set of seasons. The 63 episodes move from the Flower Realm to the Heavenly Court, then to the mortal world and the demon realm, and the comic tone fades steadily along the way. English-language recommendation lists often pair it with Eternal Love, which aired a year earlier and shares its long, operatic structure of mortal trials, old grudges between gods and a final war. The difference most reviewers point to is the opening: Ashes of Love spends its early episodes as a romantic comedy, with Jinmi treating heaven's rules as a puzzle she has no interest in solving.

It was a major hit. Wikipedia reports average CSM52 ratings of about 1.3% on Jiangsu TV, with a national peak of 1.64% for the episodes that aired on September 3, 2018. Online, it was reported to have passed 15 billion views by early 2019, though another passage gives a figure of over 10 billion, so treat the exact number as uncertain. A blog post from June 2021 listed its Douban rating as 7.7; a headline cited on Wikipedia gives 7.6. It won the Most Popular Foreign Drama award at the 2019 Seoul International Drama Awards.

Content notes: fantasy violence, war, several deaths of main and supporting characters, manipulation by a parent figure, and the heroine stabbing the hero.

Jinmi has lived for thousands of years in the Flower Realm as a grape spirit, slow to cultivate and cheerfully unaware of almost everything outside her garden. She doesn't know who her parents were, and she doesn't know that her mother fed her a Vanishing Pill at birth, a spell that keeps her from ever feeling romantic love. Then an injured bird crashes into her world. He is Xufeng, the Fire Deity and second son of the Heavenly Emperor, and the grape spirit who can't love decides he owes her a favor. Her trip to heaven drags her into a palace full of grudges: Xufeng's ruthless mother, his quiet older brother Runyu, a princess determined to marry Xufeng, and an old secret about Jinmi's own birth. Ashes of Love (香蜜沉沉烬如霜) is a 63-episode xianxia drama starring Yang Zi, Deng Lun and Luo Yunxi. It aired on Jiangsu TV in 2018 and streamed on iQIYI, Tencent Video and Youku, and it's based on a novel by Dian Xian.

Ashes of Love premiered on Jiangsu TV on August 2, 2018, and ended on September 4, 2018, with 63 episodes. It streamed in China on iQIYI, Tencent Video and Youku. Wikipedia says the DVD release runs to 60 episodes. It was directed by Zhu Ruibin, produced by Liu Ning and filmed at Hengdian World Studios from June to October 2017. The singer Sa Dingding composed music for the drama and appears in a small role.

Outside China, it streams on Viki, in a 60-episode version, and on iQIYI's international site, iQ.com, with all 63. It was on Netflix for several years but left the service at the end of 2023.

There is no season 2. In late 2025, Chinese media reported that the drama's producer, Liu Ning, was planning a short-form remake; the novel's author initially denied involvement in the reports. We'll update this section if a project is confirmed.

The opening song is "Unsullied" (不染), released in versions by Mao Buyi and Sa Dingding, and the ending song is "Upwards to the Moon" (左手指月), sung by Sa Dingding. The leads, Yang Zi and Deng Lun, also recorded a duet for the soundtrack.