Danmei is Chinese MM romance, and it is the reason your feed is full of cultivation sects, immortals and men in very good robes looking at each other. Below are nineteen danmei books available in official English translation, sorted by the kind of story you want.
I came to danmei from Western MM romance, which is probably how you are arriving too. These are the books I would hand to someone making that same jump, and the practical things I wish I had known are further down the page.
In this guide
- → Where to start, depending on what you want
- → The three everyone starts with
- → Court politics and dangerous alliances
- → Dystopias, survival games and damaged people
- → Horror, regret and very long grudges
- → Quests, exorcists and big adventures
- → The easiest way in from Western MM
- → My top 3
- → What danmei actually is
- → What surprises Western MM readers
- → The words you will meet everywhere
- → Frequently asked questions
Where to Start, Depending on What You Want
Pick a mood and jump to the book.
The Three Everyone Starts With
All three are by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, and they are the books most English-speaking readers start with. Any of them works as a first danmei. If you have already watched The Untamed, start with Grandmaster.
Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation
Wei Wuxian was one of the most gifted cultivators of his generation, until the war pushed him onto a heretical path and admiration turned to fear. The whole country celebrated when he was gone. Thirteen years later he wakes in the body of a young man who sacrificed his own soul for revenge, and has to walk back through the wreckage of his reputation. This time he does it beside Lan Wangji, whose devotion has never once wavered.
Also as a manhua
The full-colour comic adaptation, if you want the story with the art.
Heaven Official’s Blessing
Born crown prince of a prosperous kingdom, Xie Lian was famous for his beauty, his strength and his goodness, and he ascended to godhood on all three. Then he fell, and kept falling. Eight hundred years later he scrapes his way back into heaven and is sent down to hunt the ghosts nobody else wants. On the road he meets San Lang, a young man he feels bound to immediately, and who is very obviously not what he says he is.
Also as a manhua
The full-colour comic adaptation, if you want the story with the art.
The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System
Shen Yuan finishes a truly terrible webnovel, rages about it in the comments, and wakes up inside the book as Shen Qingqiu, the cruel teacher whose entire narrative purpose is to make the protagonist miserable before meeting a very bad end. He has a system telling him to stay in character and every reason not to.
Court Politics and Dangerous Alliances
These books are full of court intrigue, strategy and loyalties that cannot all be kept. The romance stays quiet, and the tension comes from everything they cannot say out loud. Expect a lot of names in the first chapters, and it gets much easier once you know who is who.
Ballad of Sword and Wine
Shen Zechuan is the eighth son of the traitor prince who handed his cities and his people to a foreign army. He is the only survivor of that bloodline and he carries the hatred of an entire nation. Nobody hates him more than Xiao Chiye, youngest son of the powerful Prince of Libei, who would love to be rid of him and cannot make it happen. Instead of sinking under his family disgrace, Shen Zechuan claws his way into the politics of the capital.
Thousand Autumns
Yan Wushi leads a demonic sect and believes every human heart is governed by cruelty and self-interest, and that anyone claiming otherwise is a liar or a fool. Shen Qiao, the gentle head of a Daoist sect, is everything he despises. When Shen Qiao is defeated and abandoned, Yan Wushi picks him up with a plan: prove to this man that his faith in people is worthless.
Peerless
An envoy and his entire escort are attacked in the snow, and a jade meant as tribute to the emperor disappears with the attackers. Feng Xiao of the imperial intelligence bureau is sent to find it, and runs straight into Cui Buqu of the rival agency, a brilliant, chronically ill man who is hiding even more than he is.
Golden Terrace
Fu Shen, the celebrated general of the northern army, is badly wounded in an ambush and comes home with a broken leg to an emperor who has long resented his influence. Yan Xiaohan, an imperial inspector known for his cruelty and his hatred of Fu Shen, is the man the emperor marries him to, in order to strip his power and tie him to a servant of the throne. The whole court expects a disaster.
Dystopias, Survival Games and Damaged People
Here danmei leaves the cultivation world for science fiction and psychological thrillers. The couples get together under threat, and Case File Compendium needs its content warnings read first.
Little Mushroom
The Earth’s magnetic field collapsed in 2030 and humanity retreated into fortified Bases while everything outside mutated. A century later, near the Abyss, a small mushroom called An Zhe is watching over his only spore when a research expedition takes it. Using the genes of a human he tried to save, he grows a human body and walks to the city gate, where Lu Feng, the Great Judge, is waiting to identify exactly the kind of creature he is.
Also as a manhua
The full-colour comic adaptation, if you want the story with the art.
Global Examination
People are pulled at random into a parallel world and made to sit exams. Each test wears the mask of a school subject, but the questions are riddles, the logic is supernatural, and failure usually costs your life. You Huo wakes there with a scrambled memory, a sharp tongue and instincts far too good for an ordinary man. Qin Jiu, one of the system’s elite invigilators, is supposed to keep candidates in line, and You Huo fits no pattern he knows.
Case File Compendium
He Yu is wealthy, beautiful and deeply troubled, and he comes home from abroad intending to win over the girl he has set his heart on. What he has actually nursed while away is his grudge against her overprotective brother, Xie Qingcheng, who was once his doctor and is the only person alive who understands his illness. An explosive incident throws them together and confirms everything Xie Qingcheng suspected.
Horror, Regret and Very Long Grudges
In the first, a tyrant is reborn at sixteen and gets a second chance, and the second is a ghost story with a flatshare in it. Neither is a light read.
The Husky and His White Cat Shizun
Having ruled the world as a tyrant, the self-proclaimed emperor Taxian-jun is cornered in his own palace, abandoned by everyone he ever cared about. His life ends there, and he wakes at sixteen as Mo Ran, a disciple of Sisheng Peak, with every mistake still ahead of him. He swears this life will have no regrets. His deepest fury is reserved for his master, Chu Wanning, elegant and remote as a cat, who thwarted him again and again in the life before.
Listen to it for free with the Audible trial, if you have not been a member in the past year.
Panguan: The Twelfth Gate
A panguan is a cultivator who settles the regrets of the dead and sends souls on to their next life, and Wen Shi has done it for nearly a thousand years. He is also caught in an endless cycle of rebirths, missing his own soul and his own memories. When Xie Wen, a spectacularly bad panguan, answers his advert for a flatmate, Wen Shi finds himself intrigued by a man who is irritating, evasive and hiding something enormous.
If the ghosts are what you came for
Western MM has its own haunted shelf, shorter and much easier to start. My ghost list is where that ends up in English, from the cosy ones to the ones that leave a mark.
Quests, Exorcists and Big Adventures
These are adventure stories, where the couple gets closer through the dangers along the way. Pick one of these if long political scheming is not what you came for.
Dinghai Fusheng Records
Three hundred years after the mystic arts vanished, China is at war with itself and the demons are closing in. The appearance of the Heart Lamp names sixteen-year-old Chen Xing as the last exorcist capable of restoring spiritual energy to heaven and earth, and gives him four years to live to do it. To survive the journey he needs Xiang Shu, a warrior the whole country blames for a terrible crime, who is now his reluctant protector.
Also as a manhua
The full-colour comic adaptation, if you want the story with the art.
Legend of Exorcism
Hongjun has grown up in the Taihang mountains, sheltered from people, half yao himself and with no reason to leave. Then his master sends him to Chang’an with orders to hide what he is and join the Great Tang Department of Demonic Exorcism. There he meets Li Jinglong, an unlucky soldier with no spiritual power at all, somehow put in charge of a team of very odd exorcists.
Listen to it for free with the Audible trial, if you have not been a member in the past year.
Stars of Chaos
Violet gold fuels the steam engines that made the Great Liang empire rich, though none of that reaches Chang Geng, raised on the poor northern frontier. When raiders attack his village he learns that his whole life has been a lie: his mother, his tutor, and above all his godfather Shen Shiliu, the one person he trusted, are none of them who they claimed. He follows that godfather into the imperial capital and into a far larger fate.
The Easiest Way In If You Read Western MM
Modern or lighter settings, where the romance is closer to the surface. If everything above sounds like homework, start here and work backwards.
Guardian
The Special Investigations Department handles the cases that sit between the living world and the Netherworld, and its director Zhao Yunlan is charismatic, sharp and very good at reading people. Looking into a strange case at a university, he crosses paths with Professor Shen Wei, whose intensity fascinates him immediately, and with whom something already seems to be connecting.
Silent Reading
A young delivery worker is found dead in the west of Yancheng, a single word written on the paper covering his face: money. For Luo Wenzhou of the criminal investigation squad it looks at first like one more case in a city built on inequality. The investigation leads him somewhere much darker, and at the centre of it stands Fei Du, a brilliant young CEO who knows far too much to be innocent and is far too useful to shut out.
The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish
Li Yu falls asleep reading a webnovel about a silent, ruthless tyrant and wakes up inside it. Not as a person: as a fish. He is adopted as the pet carp of Prince Jing, and a distinctly unhelpful magic system informs him that the only way back to a human body is to soften the prince’s cruelty. Which is difficult, from a bowl.
Thrice Married to a Salted Fish
Ten years of study are about to be wasted when aspiring imperial physician Lin Qingyu is ordered to drop everything and marry Lu Wancheng, the sickly son of a marquis, in the hope that the union will cure him. Lu Wancheng turns out to be more than a tragically fated aristocrat: there is something strange behind his eyes, and knowledge that could get Lin Qingyu everything he wanted.
My Top 3 Danmei
I would defend all nineteen books on this page, but these are the ones I recommend most. I could not choose between two for third place, so they share it.
Little Mushroom, by Yi Shi Si Zhou
A mushroom takes human form and walks into a fortified human city to find the spore that was taken from him, knowing that the man at the gate is there to unmask creatures exactly like him. It is science fiction, with no cultivation to learn, so it is the one I recommend most often.
Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu
The one everybody names first. A brilliant, reckless cultivator ends his first life hated by the whole world, comes back in a stranger’s body thirteen years later and has to face what everyone thinks he did. The mystery keeps it moving, and at the centre are two men who chose each other against everyone.
Heaven Official’s Blessing and Ballad of Sword and Wine
Heaven Official’s Blessing is the warmest book on the list: a man humiliated for eight hundred years who stays kind anyway, and a love interest devoted to him the whole way. Ballad of Sword and Wine is the opposite, cold and political, with two enemies fighting their way through a rotten court and learning to respect each other long before anything else. Pick the one that suits your mood.
What Danmei Actually Is
Danmei is the Chinese genre of romance between two men, written and read overwhelmingly by women, and published originally on serial web platforms rather than by traditional publishers. The word itself means roughly “indulging in beauty”. It is the Chinese counterpart to Japanese BL and Korean BL, and it has its own conventions, which is what this page is for.
Most of the famous titles began as web serials of several hundred chapters, which is why the English editions arrive as five, six or eight paperback volumes. What you are buying as “volume 1” is the first fifth of one story, not the first book of a series.
A lot of these books also exist as a donghua (animated series), a manhua (comic), an audio drama and sometimes a live-action show, each with different names and different endings. The novel is the original, and the most complete version.
What Surprises Western MM Romance Readers
I wish someone had told me these before I started, because every one of them caught me out.
The romance is not always the engine
In Western MM romance, the relationship is usually the plot. In danmei there is often a war, a conspiracy or an investigation first, and the relationship grows inside it. If you count the chapters the couple spends together, several of these books will disappoint you, so look at what the two of them do for each other instead.
Everyone has several names
A character will have a birth name, a courtesy name, a title, a sect nickname and whatever their partner calls them, and the book uses all of them. It is the main reason people give up on volume one. It gets much easier after the first few chapters, and the English editions include a character guide. Use it!
They are long, and the beginning is slow
A danmei is a commitment: five volumes is normal, and some go well beyond eight. The first hundred pages are usually more world building than romance, so if you are used to a 350-page contemporary where they meet in chapter one, give it more than sixty pages before deciding the genre is not for you.
The Danmei Words You Will Meet Everywhere
The short version, enough to read a blurb without opening another tab.
Danmei
Chinese MM romance. The Chinese equivalent of Japanese BL.
Cultivation
Spiritual and martial self-improvement toward power or immortality, organised into sects, clans and ranks.
Xianxia
Fantasy with immortals, gods, demons and magic. The epic, mythological end of the genre.
Wuxia
Martial arts without the magic. Human, grounded, built on honour and rivalry.
Shizun
A master or teacher. Turns up constantly, and so does the master and disciple dynamic.
Gong and shou
The two roles in the pairing, roughly top and bottom, used the way readers elsewhere would say seme and uke.
Transmigration
Waking up inside a novel or a game, often as its villain. A whole subgenre of its own.
Donghua and manhua
The animated adaptation and the comic adaptation. Neither replaces the novel.
Yao
A spirit or creature, often an animal that has cultivated its way into human form.
Extras
Bonus chapters after the ending, usually the softest and most domestic material in the whole book.
Danmei: Frequently Asked Questions
Which danmei should I read first?
Little Mushroom if you want something strange with no cultivation vocabulary to learn. Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation if you want the one everybody has read, and especially if you have already watched The Untamed. Guardian or Silent Reading if a modern setting with a case to solve sounds easier than an imperial court.
Do I need to know anything about Chinese mythology first?
No. Every book on this page explains its own world as it goes, and the English editions include character lists and translation notes. The vocabulary in the lexicon above is enough to start. The rest arrives through the story, the way it does with any fantasy series.
Why are the English editions split into so many volumes?
Because the originals are web serials of several hundred chapters. A single danmei novel becomes five to eight printed volumes in English. Volume 1 is the opening fifth of one continuous story, not a standalone book, so expect it to end mid-arc.
Are danmei novels spicy?
Most of the ones on this page are much less spicy than Western MM romance. If spice is your main reason for reading, danmei may frustrate you, but if you love tension, devotion and slow burn, you will find plenty of it here.
Is the donghua or the live-action a good substitute for the book?
They are good, but they tell a different story. Chinese adaptations are not allowed to show a romance between two men, so on screen the couple becomes a very deep friendship. Watch them, but the romance is in the novel.
Which danmei has the darkest content?
Case File Compendium and The Husky and His White Cat Shizun, by far. They are excellent, and they go much further than the rest of this list. Read the author warnings before you start rather than after.
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Do you like danmei too? Tell me which one converted you, and which one you think I have unfairly left off this list. I read every recommendation I get.
New to the genre? Start with the map.
