Qidian, Fanqie and JJWXC by the Numbers

DaoSearch lists nearly 5 million Chinese web novels across Qidian, Fanqie and JJWXC. This is a count of what those three catalogues are made of. The sizes and the left-out counts are as of 9 October 2026, read from the stats page. The status shares, the lengths and the order of the categories were first counted on 9 September 2026 and recounted on 27 September 2026, after a cleanup that hid duplicate copies of the same novel and a lot of JJWXC drafts. The live figures are on the stats page and move every day, so treat everything here as rounded. Faloo is the fourth platform and isn't in these tables: its own numbers are here.

How big each one is

JJWXC is the biggest by raw count, which surprises people. It's been running since 2003 and anyone can post there, so it holds a huge number of short works next to its famous long ones. You'll see that in the lengths below.

What we leave out

Every platform hosts things that aren't web novels. We hold those but don't list them, and since late September 2026 we also hide duplicate copies of the same novel, keeping the best one:

• Qidian: print-store titles (出版) and duplicates, about 273,000.
• Fanqie: print and study editions, entries whose title only ever reached us masked, video and comic series, and duplicates, about 148,000.
• JJWXC: reviews of other books, poetry, unpublished shells, abandoned stubs and tiny drafts nobody read, about 3.2 million. JJWXC's pile is big because it's an open writing site.

So the counts above are novels, not everything each platform has ever hosted.

How many are finished

The rest of JJWXC, about 4%, has no status at all.

Fanqie has the highest completed share, and JJWXC by far the lowest. Only about one listed JJWXC book in four is marked finished, so the status filter matters more there than on the other two. "Ongoing" just means the author never marked the book done, on every platform, and plenty of ongoing books stopped years ago. The Updated filter sorts the live ones from the dead ones: here's how.

How long finished books run

From a random sample of about 3% of completed books on each platform:

A few things jump out.

Fanqie's finished books are the longest in the middle. The median completed Fanqie novel is more than twice the length of Qidian's. Fanqie pays authors on reading time, so there's every reason to write long.

Qidian's median is dragged down by its short fiction. Short Story (短篇) is a whole category there. The top quarter of finished Qidian books still runs past 430,000 characters, and the famous ones run to millions.

JJWXC's are the shortest. Half its finished books are under about 78,000 characters. Romance and danmei often run shorter than a cultivation epic, and JJWXC has a lot of novellas. The big names are long, though: the most favorited JJWXC books here run from a few hundred thousand characters to more than two million.

What each platform is made of

The biggest categories on each, largest first:

Three platforms, three different literatures:

• Qidian is fantasy first. Eastern fantasy, urban and light novels lead, and it's still where cultivation lives: tens of thousands of cultivation books against a few thousand on Fanqie.
• Fanqie is romance and urban. Modern romance alone is several times the size of Qidian's.
• JJWXC doesn't split by setting at all. Its categories are orientation, and romance plus danmei make up most of the catalogue.

Tags mean something different on each

Qidian uses about 820 tags and Fanqie about 690. JJWXC gets by with about 300 for about two million books, so a JJWXC tag covers a lot of ground. 情有独钟 (Devoted Love) and 甜文 (Sweet Story) are each on roughly one listed JJWXC book in six.

On Qidian and Fanqie a single tag can narrow a search a long way. On JJWXC, treat a tag as a category and combine it with something else. What the JJWXC labels mean.

If you translate

Length decides whether a project is a month or a year, so here's the rough math. A thousand Chinese characters usually comes out at somewhere around 600 to 700 English words. By that rule:

• the median finished JJWXC book is a short English novel, roughly 50,000 words
• the median finished Qidian book is roughly 65,000 to 75,000 words
• the median finished Fanqie book is roughly 140,000 to 160,000 words, a doorstop
• a million-character epic is 600,000 words or more

Filters that turn that into a shortlist:

• Completed danmei under 200k characters, by favorites
• Completed Fanqie books under 500k characters, by all-time reads
• Completed Qidian books over 500k characters, by fans

Then check the signal that matters on that platform: monthly votes or fans on Qidian, all-time reads on Fanqie, favorites on JJWXC.

Where the older numbers are

In August, before JJWXC arrived, we did a deeper genre count for Qidian and Fanqie, including the tag layer, and it has been recounted too. The shape hasn't changed, but Fanqie has kept growing fast: its biggest categories are between about 30% and 60% bigger than they were in August. JJWXC's own numbers are explained here.

Explore the catalogue: Qidian (novels, rankings, stats); Fanqie (novels, rankings, stats); JJWXC (novels, rankings, stats).