Noble Aspirations: How a Famous Web Novel Became a Two-Part Xianxia Drama in 2016

Why this one

Noble Aspirations (青云志, Qing Yun Zhi; TMDB lists it as The Legend of Chusen) is a xianxia (仙侠, "immortal heroes") drama, part of the Chinese fantasy genre of cultivators, sects and demons. It begins with a village that no longer exists. Zhang Xiaofan (张小凡), a boy from Caomiao Village (草庙村, "Grass Temple Village"), survives a massacre that kills his family, and the sect that takes him in is the one that will later ask him to choose between his people and a woman it calls an enemy.

The drama aired in the summer of 2016 and drew attention for reasons beyond the plot. It adapts Zhu Xian (诛仙, "Immortal-Slaying"), a web novel that had been waiting for a screen version for roughly a decade. It cast Li Yifeng (李易峰), Zhao Liying (赵丽颖) and Yang Zi (杨紫). It aired in two parts, the first on Hunan TV and online, the second on Tencent Video alone. And its special effects, reported at about 50 million yuan, became the main subject of the criticism it received. The show is finished and the plot here stays at the level of the opening episodes.

Save

The setup

The official synopsis, as TMDB gives it, starts with two children. Zhang Xiaofan and Lin Jingyu (林惊羽) are the only survivors of the massacre that destroyed their families, and the Qing Yun Sect (青云门, Qing Yun Men), the leading orthodox sect of the cultivation world, raises them. Lin Jingyu is the gifted one. Xiaofan is not, and the early episodes follow a boy who has to find his place in a sect that has no obvious use for him.

The story widens from there. Xiaofan meets Bi Yao (碧瑶), the daughter of the Ghost King (鬼王, Gui Wang), the leader of the sect's demonic rivals, and the central conflict becomes his loyalty to his teachers against his feelings for her. That is the premise the marketing leaned on, and the one the rest of the series is organized around.

Save

Cast and crew

• Li Yifeng (李易峰) as Zhang Xiaofan

• Zhao Liying (赵丽颖) as Bi Yao (碧瑶)

• Yang Zi (杨紫) as Lu Xueqi (陆雪琪), a Qing Yun disciple

• Cheng Yi (成毅) as Lin Jingyu (林惊羽)

• Qin Junjie (秦俊杰) as Zeng Shushu (曾书书)

• Jackson Yee (易烊千玺) as Xiao Qi (小七)

Zhu Ruibin (朱锐斌), Liu Guohui (刘国辉) and Zhou Yuanzhou (周远舟) are among the credited directors, and Shao Xiaoyi (邵潇逸) and Zhang Shaowei (张少微) wrote the screenplay. H&R Century Pictures (欢瑞世纪) produced it. The list of directors above is partial.

Save

The novel behind it: Zhu Xian

Zhu Xian is by Xiao Ding (萧鼎). According to Jiemian, he began serializing it online in 2003. The China Writers' Association website puts its length at about 1.6 million characters. The Paper reports that the publisher Mo Tie (磨铁) issued the first print edition in 2005, the author's first book in simplified Chinese, and that the game rights were sold in 2006 for more than a million yuan. Perfect World (完美世界) released the online game in 2007.

The screen rights were first sold in 2007, and reports of a screen adaptation appeared nearly every year for a decade afterwards, according to the same China Writers' Association piece. That history explains why the 2016 drama arrived with an audience that already knew the story. Jiemian describes the novel's readership as made up largely of people who had grown up with it in the 1980s and 1990s, which put the drama in the position of satisfying readers as well as winning new viewers.

The novel has been adapted again since. A film, Jade Dynasty (诛仙), directed by Ching Siu-tung (程小东), came out in 2019, and an animated series followed in 2022.

The cast and the 2016 xianxia season

Zhao Liying had played Hua Qiangu in The Journey of Flower (花千骨), a Hunan TV xianxia drama that aired in 2015. Li Yifeng headed the cast as Zhang Xiaofan. Yang Zi played Lu Xueqi, a Qing Yun disciple whose path crosses Xiaofan's.

Save

The summer of 2016 was crowded with fantasy and period dramas on the same channel. Hunan TV's "diamond" exclusive slot carried both Noble Aspirations and Huan Cheng (幻城), and Jiemian noted that Noble Aspirations used the same combined television-and-online release as The Journey of Flower. The China Writers' Association piece grouped Huan Cheng, Noble Aspirations and Love O2O (微微一笑很倾城) as summer dramas that none became hits, and read the season as a sign that the rush to buy popular online novels was cooling.

The cast's later careers connect the drama to the xianxia that followed. Yang Zi starred in Ashes of Love (香蜜沉沉烬如霜) in 2018, and Zhao Liying starred in The Legend of Shen Li (与凤行) in 2024.

⚠️ Li Yifeng was later the subject of a legal matter: in September 2022 Beijing police announced that an actor surnamed Li had been placed under administrative detention for soliciting prostitution, China Central Television confirmed it was Li Yifeng, and the Huading Awards organizers cancelled the best-actor title he had received for this drama.

Two parts, two platforms

The release was split. The first part, 55 episodes, premiered on Hunan TV on July 31, 2016 and ran until November 8. Youku, Tencent Video and Mango TV streamed it alongside the broadcast, an arrangement called tai wang (台网, "television plus online"). The second part, 18 episodes, was released on Tencent Video on December 8, 2016 for paying members only, with three episodes arriving each Thursday, and finished on January 12, 2017.

The two audiences produced different numbers. TMTPost reported that the series passed 100 million online views within 24 hours and ended the year as the top online drama of 2016 with 25.6 billion views. The same piece reported that television ratings fell to 0.375 on October 25. The first broadcast had reached a 1.352 rating in CSM's 52-city survey, according to Jiemian. Ratings and online views are measured on different scales and by different bodies, so they do not compare directly, but the direction of the two lines is the story: strong streaming figures and a television audience that shrank through the autumn.

The effects argument

The production spent heavily on its effects. Jiemian reported the effects budget at about 50 million yuan, and a later Jiemian piece said that around 80 percent of the shots needed effects, with more than 1,700 minutes of effects footage. The work was split between the South Korean company IOFX and Dingsheng Jiazuo (鼎盛佳作), part of the Chinese company Yihe Culture (亿和文化).

Save

The reception did not match the spending. Jiemian reported criticism of the effects within days of the premiere, and TMTPost wrote on August 25 that viewers mocked the look of that summer's fantasy dramas and found the expensive effects only marginally better than cheap ones. TMTPost also pointed out that weak effects had never hurt ratings on their own, which fits the pattern above: the online numbers stayed high while the broadcast ratings fell.

The China Writers' Association described the television audience's response as ordinary and said the drama had not brought back the novel's earlier popularity. Whether that reflects the effects, the adaptation or the age of the source, the sources do not agree.

Where to watch

TMDB lists the series under The Legend of Chusen, and iQIYI's international site lists it as Noble Aspirations. A May 2025 r/CDrama post said that the series, along with two other dramas, was free on iQIYI for three days, 17 to 19 May. We could not confirm which languages the subtitles cover or whether the free access continues. Availability varies by region, so search both titles on iQIYI's international service and on Tencent's WeTV in your country.

What overseas viewers are saying

Discussion of the series on r/CDrama is small. A search of the subreddit found five posts that name the show, each with at most nine comments. We could not retrieve MyDramaList or Douban pages, so we give no ratings from either.

In a thread where a poster could not decide between this and Love of Thousand Years, one commenter wrote "If have to choose between the 2, I'd pick Legend of Chusen." Another poster described a "love/hate relationship with this show" in a thread that mostly concerns the later plot. Two commenters who had read the novel said the drama's treatment of the central roles differs from the book, and one of them added that a reboot might have suited the story better. A viewer who stopped around the middle of the second part said the plot lost them.

Some posts refer to a third season; sources list two parts. These are the views of viewers who chose to post, not a poll.