Against the Current: a disgraced noblewoman takes a dead servant's name

2026 · Tencent Video (exclusive), CCTV drama channel · Tan Songyun (谭松韵), Liu Xueyi (刘学义)

The sections below were written in the first weeks of the show's run and cover the premise and production. The ending, now that the series has finished airing, is covered in the spoiler section further down.

Why this one

Against the Current (兰香如故) premiered on September 11, 2026, on Tencent Video, which holds the exclusive domestic streaming rights, and it was also shown on the CCTV drama channel, with Disney+ and WeTV listed as international platforms at launch. It runs 47 episodes of about 45 minutes each. It was the newest title in this column when this guide was first written, which made it a chance to look at a drama's opening rather than at a settled reputation.

The setup

Shen Jialan is the granddaughter of a senior minister of the Grand Secretariat (内阁). Her family is destroyed when her grandfather is falsely accused of treason. Her engagement to Lin Jinqi, the grandson of the Minister of Personnel, is broken off by the Lin family, who want to protect themselves and marry into a more influential house instead.

She survives because a family who used to serve hers helps her escape. They have her take the identity of their dead daughter, Xu Lanxiang, and she enters the Lin household as a servant. According to published synopses, she gradually earns respect through intelligence and integrity while uncovering the conspiracy that destroyed her family. The drama's title is a play on the name she has to live under: Lanxiang rugu (兰香如故) can be read as "Lanxiang, as ever," a name that stays the same even as the person wearing it changes.

注 The hidden-identity maid: Disguise as a servant is one of the oldest engines in Chinese costume drama, because it lets a highborn heroine be placed at the bottom of a household hierarchy while keeping her education, her manners, and her secrets. The interesting variable in any version is what the disguise costs. Here the heroine's new employers are the family that abandoned her, which raises the emotional stakes of every ordinary domestic scene.

Cast and crew worth knowing

• Tan Songyun (谭松韵) as Xu Lanxiang / Shen Jialan.

• Liu Xueyi (刘学义) as Lin Jinqi.

• Guo Keyu (郭柯宇) as Xue Guihua, the servant woman whose dead daughter's name the heroine takes.

• Directed by Huang Yingxiang (黄颖湘) and Chen Dan (陈丹), from a screenplay credited to Tong Hua and Xiao Lou.

• Adapted from the novel Lanxiang Yuan (兰香缘) by He Yanshan.

How it ends (spoilers)

This section describes the final episodes. If you have not finished the series, skip to "Where to watch."

Tencent Video opened paid early access, chaoqian dianbo (超前点播, "advance on-demand"), to the final episodes on October 5, 2026. The finale aired on CCTV-8 on October 11 and reached Tencent Video's standard membership tier on October 12.

Lin Jinqi dies at about fifty, of an old battlefield injury, with Xu Lanxiang beside him. He produces a red cord he had asked for at a Yue Lao temple (月老庙, "Matchmaker Deity temple") and tells her it ties one woman, who was Shen Jialan before her marriage and Xu Lanxiang after it. The recaps differ on whether he dies on her shoulder or in her arms; they agree on the cord and the age. When she dies, the cord is no longer on her wrist.

Xu Lanxiang outlives him by about thirty years. She runs the Lin household, writes plays that set down the Shen family's story, and dies in her sleep at eighty, holding not the red cord but a pouch (香囊, xiangnang) her birth mother had marked in blood with the character for "live". The Shen family is cleared only long after her death. Many viewers read the pouch as her choosing to end her life as Shen Jialan rather than as Xu Lanxiang.

The older generation leaves along the way. Her mother-in-law Qin Shunhua (秦舜华) dies of illness after handing her the household keys, and Xue Guihua (薛桂花), who raised her under the borrowed name, dies saying that Lanxiang has come for her.

The novel Lanxiang Yuan (兰香缘) ends differently, with the couple together.

Reception of the ending split. Some viewers praised the foreshadowing and the restraint of the last episodes; others found the final stretch rushed, and readers of the novel objected to the changed ending. The red cord drew the most discussion: some read the bare wrist as a choice, others sided with Lin Jinqi and called her cold toward him. A clip of her dying in his arms that circulated online was a fan re-edit, not the broadcast. The actors extended the ending off screen: from September 23 Liu Xueyi posted seventeen in-character diary entries as Lin Jinqi, and on the finale day Tan Songyun published a long reply in Xu Lanxiang's voice, written during the run and kept private until then. On the red cord she wrote that if it works, the two will "surely find each other" in the next life.

Where to watch

• Tencent Video and CCTV-8 in China

• WeTV and Disney+ internationally

• 47 episodes; the finale aired on CCTV-8 on October 11 and on Tencent Video's standard tier on October 12, 2026.

Availability and subtitle options vary by region and change over time, so check the platform in your country.

What to watch for

These questions were written while the show was still airing, so they are structural rather than evaluative; the ending is covered in the spoiler section above. How long the series keeps the disguise in place is the first: it determines whether the story is about a woman hiding, or about a woman rebuilding while hidden. The second is how the show distributes its attention between the household politics in the Lin family and the larger political conspiracy behind her grandfather's fall. Dramas that combine an inner-household plot with a court plot often struggle to balance the two, and Against the Current has 47 episodes in which to try.