The 20 Best Donghua to Watch Right Now

The defining works

The top six are not simply "good donghua." They are the series a newcomer should reach for to understand what the medium is capable of, and each one leads its own lane. Lord of Mysteries holds the top spot for a second month because nothing has challenged its ceiling: the adaptation of Cuttlefish That Loves Diving's 1,432-chapter novel turns a Victorian-flavoured occult mystery into television, and its 22-Sequence Beyonder framework — mapped onto the Major Arcana of the Tarot — remains the most intricate magic system currently animated. Its 9.4 is the highest composite on the board, and it earns the rank outright. It also carried the month's only major new release: the three-episode special Prey (Crunchyroll, June 20, 2026) went back and animated the Silver City and Vice-Admiral arcs the thirteen-episode first season had skipped — fresh, English-accessible content that only firms up its hold on the top spot ahead of a full second season slated for 2027.

Beneath it sits the list's most interesting tension. Link Click carries a 9.1 aggregate — higher than the 8.9 of To Be Hero X above it — yet ranks third. That is deliberate, and it is exactly what a composite model is supposed to do: To Be Hero X is Li Haoling's bilibili × Aniplex production whose 3D-to-2D transitions are the year's technical high-water mark, and it is currently the more accessible entry point for a new Western viewer. Link Click, Studio LAN's time-travel drama, is arguably the finer show — but as of July it sits between seasons, and a ranking meant to answer "what should I watch this month" weights what is actually airing. That window is closing on a fixed date: Season 3 Part One has been confirmed for August 14, 2026 on Bilibili (moved up from an earlier autumn estimate). When it airs and the reception is in, expect this gap to close fast (see the watch-list below).

The remaining three round out the tier by range rather than by rivalry. Mo Dao Zu Shi is the MXTX adaptation that mainstreamed cultivation drama for the West and still sets the bar for political-supernatural plotting. Heaven Official's Blessing pairs a watercolour-meets-CGI aesthetic Western studios have not matched with a mythological love story. And Fog Hill of Five Elements — a hand-drawn ink-wash action piece from a tiny core team at Samsara Animation — is the strongest argument on this list that donghua's visual language owes nothing to anyone.

The cultivation backbone

If the S-tier shows what the medium can do at its peak, the A-tier is where most viewers will actually spend their hours — the long-running, deeply satisfying series that define donghua's mainstream. It opens on two outliers: The King's Avatar, the esports drama that proved competitive gaming could be filmed cinematically, and Release That Witch, an engineer-reincarnation isekai whose technology-versus-magic premise is sharper than the genre's usual fare.

From there the tier becomes a tour of cultivation fantasy at every temperature. Soul Land is the long-running phenomenon that turned Tang San's spirit-ring system into a foundational text. The Daily Life of the Immortal King proves xianxia can be a slice-of-life comedy without losing its teeth. Perfect World is the genre undiluted — a stolen supreme-being bone, a feral protagonist, and a loneliness the show never flinches from. A Mortal's Journey to Immortality earns its place with the opposite virtue: a patient, grounded "mortal" climb that treats cultivation as labour rather than destiny, and remains the gold standard for that low-key register.

The tier closes on the two pillars new xianxia is still measured against. Battle Through the Heavens is the commercial benchmark — Xiao Yan's three-year promise is the arc every newer series quietly imitates — while Renegade Immortal is its dark mirror: Wang Lin's story is the most uncompromising cultivation narrative animated, a two-thousand-year account of what survival actually costs. Watch them back to back and you have the genre's full emotional range.

Range and range-breakers

The bottom third is not a drop in quality so much as a widening of scope — this is where the list stops being about cultivation and starts showing how far donghua reaches. The Outcast drags Daoist mysticism into a present-day setting and is one of the few entries with genuine crossover recognition in Japan. Throne of Seal brings a Western-fantasy flavour of knights and divine seals to a genre usually rooted in Chinese myth.

Then the range-breakers. Scissor Seven is the scrappy indie assassin-comedy that reached a global audience through streaming and remains the easiest show here to hand a sceptical friend. The Magic Chef of Ice and Fire folds cultivation into culinary fantasy — sillier on paper, more charming in practice. And the list closes on two of the most beautiful things Chinese animation has produced: Big Fish & Begonia, a mythic coming-of-age film built on Zhuangzi and folk cosmology, and The Legend of Hei, whose cat-spirit hero has the widest all-ages appeal of anything on this page. They rank where they do only because they are singular works rather than ongoing series — but as entry points for someone who has never watched donghua, either is close to perfect.