How to Find Baihe (GL) Novels in English: Filters, Tropes and Boards

Baihe (百合, "lily") is Chinese female-female romance, the same flower as the Japanese yuri. Like danmei, nearly all of it that English readers know came from JJWXC, 晋江文学城. Unlike danmei, nobody has made a list of the best of it.

The shelf is big enough to need one. As of October 2026, DaoSearch lists about 102,000 baihe books on JJWXC, which is the platform's fourth largest category. About 31,000 of them are marked finished. The danmei guide works the same way, and this one follows it step by step.

Start with the category

Baihe (GL) on JJWXC is the whole shelf, sorted by favorites. The first page is the canon.

The Subgenre filter splits baihe by era, and that's JJWXC's own second axis, so each book sits in exactly one:

• Modern Era, about 64,000 books, nearly two in three
• Alternate History, about 24,000
• Fantasy & Future, about 7,500
• Ancient Era, about 6,000

So modern baihe is the bulk of it, and historical or palace baihe is the thin end. If you want a period setting, start there and don't expect a deep list.

Status, length and favorites

Three filters do most of the work.

Status. Only about 30% of baihe books are marked finished, which is typical of JJWXC. Completed baihe, by favorites is the safest list on the site.

Length. The median finished baihe book is about 126,000 Chinese characters, or very roughly 80,000 English words. About 19,000 of the finished ones come in under 200,000 characters, so completed baihe under 200k characters is a big shelf of books you can finish in a weekend. A thousand characters is roughly 600 to 700 English words.

Minimum favorites. This is the filter that matters most for baihe, because the shelf is so thin at the top. Favorites are how JJWXC readers rank a book themselves, and here is how the baihe shelf thins out:

Close to half of all baihe books have fewer than 10 favorites. Completed baihe with at least 1k favorites leaves about 11,000 finished books a real audience chose, and at least 10k leaves about 2,700. Start at 10k and work down.

Free or paid

JJWXC is a paid site. A popular novel usually opens with free chapters and then locks the rest as VIP chapters that readers buy. The Access filter separates the two, and by that measure about 88,000 baihe books are free and about 14,000 are paid.

That doesn't mean the free ones are the good ones. The best-loved books are nearly all paid. Free completed baihe with 10k favorites or more comes to only about 50 books, against about 2,700 once you stop filtering on access. Free baihe is worth it for short, finished books and for sampling. Don't use it as a quality filter.

DaoSearch doesn't host any of it. The Source link on a book page goes to the novel on JJWXC.

A note on POV

Danmei has a POV filter that asks who the story follows, shou or gong. JJWXC fills in that field for baihe books too, with the same two words, so the options read Bottom-Lead and Top-Lead on a story with no men in it. Treat them as noise here. Dual POV, about 8,600 books, is the one that means something: the story is told from both leads' sides.

Tropes

JJWXC uses about 300 tags for its whole catalogue, so each one covers a lot of ground. Pair a tag with the baihe category, and usually with a status or a favorites floor. These are the ones that sit on the most baihe books, with their real counts:

• Sweet Story (甜文), about 23,000
• Power Couple (强强), about 11,000: both leads are strong and nobody gets rescued
• Campus (校园), about 12,000
• Angst (虐文), about 8,000
• Younger Love Interest (年下), about 6,400
• Second-Chance Romance (破镜重圆), about 5,900
• Showbiz (娱乐圈), about 5,700
• Transmigrated Into Book (穿书), about 4,600 and Rebirth (重生), about 4,500
• Bickering Lovers (欢喜冤家), Childhood Sweethearts (青梅竹马) and Secret Crush (暗恋), each about 3,000 to 4,800
• Xianxia Cultivation (仙侠修真), about 4,000, for a setting

Tone works as a pair, and the exclude box matters as much as the include one. Sweet baihe with angst excluded is the list for a week when you don't want to be hurt, and swapping the two gives you the opposite.

The full vocabulary, with book counts, is on the JJWXC tag index. What the labels mean, and why we translated them that way.

The boards

JJWXC's rankings come sliced by channel, and Baihe (GL) is one of the six every main board has. These four are the ones to open:

• Completed Gold, Baihe (完结金榜): finished books ranked against finished books, a hundred deep. The best single page to pick a completed novel from.
• Monthly, Baihe (月度排行榜): what's leading right now. Mostly ongoing serials.
• King Ticket, Baihe (霸王票总榜): ranked by the paid tickets readers throw at a book. The biggest fandoms.
• VIP Gold, Baihe (VIP金榜): the top-earning paid serials, so read it as what baihe readers are paying for this season.

Hall of Eternity, Baihe (长生殿) is JJWXC's long-run honour board and has only about 40 books. A book's page lists every board it sits on under Honours.

Booklists: other readers did the sorting

JJWXC readers curate booklists constantly, and there are a good many for baihe. JJWXC grades its lists A, B or C, and A-level lists are the ones to start with. The Min. follows and Min. books filters narrow them further.

The better route is backwards from a book you loved. Open its page and look at "In booklists". Every list there was built by someone who liked that novel too. The booklists page also has a Book picker that finds every list containing a given novel. Inside a list, you can sort by favorites and filter to Completed, which turns a long list into a ready-made shelf. More on how to mine booklists.

Baihe outside JJWXC

Fanqie, the free app, files it two ways. Two Female Leads (双女主) is a category of its own, about 15,600 books, and about half of them are finished. The Two Female Leads tag is on about the same number. Sorting by all-time reads shows what got big there. Fanqie's baihe is free to read and tends to be faster and lighter than JJWXC's. What Fanqie's read counts mean.

Faloo has a Baihe (GL) tag on about 1,500 books.

One caution. Two Female Leads is a shape of cast, and a story can have two female leads without being a romance between them. Read the synopsis.

A starting sequence

1. Open Completed Gold for baihe and pick two synopses you like.
2. Note the tags they share, then filter the baihe category by those tags with a favorites floor.
3. Exclude the tags you've learned you dislike.
4. Open the booklists your favourite of those appears in.
5. Save the search, so next month's finished novels show up in it. How saved searches work.

If a book you want has no English yet, its page has a Request a translation button that opens the request form on RandomTranslator, our sister site, with the title and author filled in. If RandomTranslator already has it, the button reads Read the translation.

去书库看看：晋江（作品，排行榜，数据）；番茄（作品，排行榜，数据）。