Second season of the hit Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty series wins Best Drama
Now this is absolutely wild news to me — that the Chinese drama Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty: To The West has just won the Asian Academy Creative Awards 2025 for Best Drama Series.
Not because the second season of the hit C-drama series won, as anyone who has watched it knows Strange Tales is absolutely brilliant, but that it actually beat out the favorite When Life Gives You Tangerines to the top spot.
Only by 0.06 points but, still, a definite win for Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty. Yay!
Why Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty: To the West winning is such amazing news
Now, first, When Life Gives You Tangerines was a huge hit for South Korea.
Not only sitting on the Netflix Top 10 Non-English TV Series chart for nine weeks, but also being nominated for nine Baeksang Arts Awards in South Korea, and winning four, including Best Drama.
Chinese dramas, on the other hand, typically don’t appear on Netflix (with a few exceptions) and, even when they do, are rarely as popular as K-dramas.
So, to see Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty: To The West beating out When Life Gives You Tangerines for a prestigious international Best Drama award, even with such a small winning margin, is still amazing.
What I loved even more was watching the announcement of the winning Asian drama, and seeing the faces of Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty stars Yang Xu Wen and Yang Zhi Gang as, from their expressions before the award was announced, and likely due to the huge success of When Life Gives You Tangerines, they clearly did not expect the winner to be their drama.
It was even cuter to see Yang Xu Wen, before the winner was announced, explaining to Yang Zhi Gang, who likely doesn’t speak much English, what the 0.06 margin between the two dramas meant.
(Watch the video below, which starts at the announcement of the Best Drama award. Wait until after Yang Xu Wen and Yang Zhi Gang have finished speaking, if you don’t speak Chinese, as one of the announcers explains what they said in their acceptance speeches.).
The Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty series
The Chinese mystery horror thriller to win the Best Drama award at the Asian Academy Creative Awards 2025 is the second season of the currently incredibly popular three-season series.
Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty: To The West premiered on July 18th, 2024 on iQIYI and ran until August 2nd, 2024.
The plot follows on from Season 1 with main leads Lu Ling Feng (played by Yang Xu Wen), Su Wu Ming (Yang Zhi Gang), Pei Xi Jun (Gao Si Wen), Fei Ying Jun (Chen Chuang), and Ying Tao (Sun Xue Ning) heading to the west, after Lu Ling Feng is demoted and banished to Yunding, far away from the capital city.
It features eight more strange cases for the group to solve during its 40 episode series and, while some worried it would be lower quality or less exciting than the C-drama’s first season, in fact the opposite was true.
Like Season 1 (but not Season 3, which has a different director), Season 2 — aka Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty: To The West — is masterfully directed by Bai Shan, and written by Wei Feng Hua, who is also the original creator of the series.
Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty: To The West, along with Seasons 1 (which you should watch first) and Season 3 (which you should watch after) is now streaming on iQIYI.
And yes, congratulations to everyone involved in the making of Strange Tales of Tang Dynasty: To The West for winning the Asian Academy Creative Award for Best Drama.
An award that is so incredibly well-deserved, I can’t even.
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