The Apothecary Diaries Season 1 & 2 Recap: Catch Up for Season 3

Maomao grew up in a brothel district, learning medicine from her adoptive father Luomen. She gets kidnapped and sold into the rear palace, where she ends up doing laundry and keeping her head down.

The emperor’s infant children are getting sick, and people are calling it a curse. Maomao works out that it’s the lead in the concubines’ face powder and leaves an anonymous warning. Gyokuyou listens and her daughter survives. The other consort’s child doesn’t.

Jinshi, the gorgeous eunuch who runs the rear palace, has no trouble finding out who wrote the note. Gyokuyou makes Maomao her food taster and lady-in-waiting. Maomao is mostly happy about the poisons she gets to taste.

From there Jinshi keeps handing her problems. She traces a batch of sick soldiers to the firewood their meal was cooked on. He asks her for an aphrodisiac, and the chocolate she makes works far too well. A “ghost” dancing on the palace walls at night turns out to be the concubine Fuyou, who was faking madness to get out of the palace and marry the man she loved. Then Maomao nurses Consort Lihua, who is wasting away because one of her own attendants is still using the poisoned powder.

At the garden party Maomao’s freckles get exposed as fake. She paints them on to keep men from bothering her. Jinshi gives her a hairpin, which in the palace means something, and Gyokuyou is a little jealous.

The soup gets poisoned. Maomao, tasting for Gyokuyou, catches it, and an officer collapses too. Looking at the bowl later, she thinks the real target was the young consort Lishu, whose own ladies-in-waiting treat her terribly.

Maomao talks Lihaku, a big friendly soldier, into escorting her outside the palace so she can visit her father. Back at the Verdigris House, the brothel she grew up in, she solves a tobacco poisoning between a courtesan and a client. She also checks on a sick woman kept in a back room.

Back at court, an official named Kounen dies after a night of drinking, from salt. A servant drowns, and a will makes it look like suicide. Both deaths lead back to the poisoned soup.

Lishu is still being picked on, and she has an allergy that matters a lot. Maomao is sent to help Consort Ah-Duo, the emperor’s oldest companion. Going through old records, she finds out Ah-Duo’s baby son died years ago. The doctor who delivered him was thrown out of the palace afterward. That doctor was Luomen, Maomao’s father.

Fengming, Ah-Duo’s head lady-in-waiting, admits she’s been behind the attacks on Lishu. Guilt over the baby’s death had twisted into this. Fengming is executed and Ah-Duo leaves the palace. Maomao keeps thinking about the dates, and starts to suspect Ah-Duo’s son and another baby were switched at birth.

Then the court purges a large group of palace women, and Maomao is on the list. She asks to stay because her family owes the Verdigris House a lot of money. Jinshi doesn’t stop her leaving, regrets it almost immediately, and goes to the brothel to buy out her contract himself.

Maomao fails the exam to become a proper court lady, so she ends up as Jinshi’s personal assistant in the outer court. She misses apothecary work and spends a lot of time wandering into places she shouldn’t, like the military offices, where she feels someone watching her.

A new high consort, Loulan, arrives, and Maomao is asked to coach her. The same night a food warehouse explodes, and Maomao picks up an ivory pipe at the scene. Other cases pile up. A bureaucrat falls into a coma after eating raw pufferfish, and the real cause is badly prepared imported seaweed, put there by his younger brother. A dead metalworker leaves three sons a locked chest that Maomao opens by melting the solder with focused sunlight.

She also sneaks Jinshi into town in disguise for a day, which he enjoys a lot more than she does.

The man watching her turns out to be Lakan, a strategist with a monocle and a reputation for winning every battle. Jinshi clearly doesn’t like how interested Lakan is in her. Meanwhile we learn the sick woman at the Verdigris House is Maomao’s mother, and a palace woman named Suirei says she has a medicine that can bring people back from the dead.

The ivory pipe and a theft of tools point to a plot. Maomao rushes to a palace purification ceremony and gets hit by a guard on the way in. A heavy ornament falls toward Jinshi and Lakan pulls him clear. The ceremonial tools had been cast in a lead alloy, and someone had set the whole thing up. There’s another body in Suirei’s coffin, so she faked her death. Gyokuyou may be pregnant again.

Lihaku wants to buy out Pairin, a courtesan at the Verdigris House, and asks Maomao how much that would cost. Maomao then gets ordered to make a hundred rosebushes bloom out of season for a party. She does it, and colors some of them with dyed water while she’s at it. Lakan spots that she’s painted her nails.

So she challenges him to a game of Chinese chess where the loser drinks from a cup, and some of the cups are drugged. Lakan loses and collapses. Coming to, he remembers Fengxian, a courtesan he loved, who was pregnant with his child when he left to study abroad.

Fengxian is Maomao’s mother. She kept the baby, and the baby was Maomao. When Lakan has to pick a courtesan to buy out, he picks Fengxian. Later that night Maomao slips on the palace wall, Jinshi catches her, and for a second the two of them get very close.

Season 2 opens with Gyokuyou pregnant. Maomao makes her disinfecting oils, Loulan’s huge entourage starts making the other consorts look shabby, and Princess Lingli finds a kitten that Maomao ends up looking after. The kitten gets named Maomao.

A diplomatic delegation is coming with a trade caravan. Maomao finds that some popular perfumes are dangerous for pregnant women and connects them to the old face-powder poisonings, and the palace starts inspecting everything. A body turns up in a coffin that belongs to someone else, a missing palace woman, and the explanation involves poison mushrooms and jealousy. Jinshi confiscates Maomao’s mushroom stash.

The envoys are searching for a woman of unearthly beauty, and the palace’s best candidate is Jinshi. One night the envoys see a glowing figure dancing in the moonlight. Maomao’s explanation is moths drawn to a scent, plus Jinshi in disguise. She starts to suspect the envoys have plans for Gyokuyou.

At Lihua’s pavilion a sick servant is found locked in a shed, and Lihua’s head lady-in-waiting, Shin, has been hoarding banned oils. Lihua fires her. Jinshi and Maomao visit an old shrine that used to choose emperors. Maomao figures out the test was really checking for color blindness, and Jinshi passes it.

Maomao gets moved to a storage shed for a while, which doesn’t stop her making medicine. Empress Dowager Anshi asks her to find out whether the late emperor was cursed. In his old rooms Maomao finds a poisonous stone and a pigment made with arsenic, which explains why his body never decayed. There’s also a hidden painting, and with it some of Anshi’s history with him.

Then a hunting trip in the north. Jinshi had been planning to reveal who he really is there. Assassins attack near a waterfall, and he and Maomao fall into a cave, where she has to revive him.

His real name is Ka Zuigetsu, and he is the Emperor’s younger brother. The search party, helped by Lihaku’s dog, catches one of the assassins, and Maomao suspects the foreign envoys were involved.

Maomao’s friend Xiaolan is thinking about leaving the palace. Maomao uses the rear-palace baths to get to know the consorts, and hears about a ghost at Lishu’s pavilion. It turns out to be a mirror and some steam.

Xiaolan breaks a block of ice meant for Loulan, so Maomao and Jinshi turn it into ice cream. The bigger problem is that Gyokuyou’s baby is breech and may need a caesarean. Maomao recommends her father, and Luomen comes back to the palace.

Maomao writes plain warnings about dangerous cosmetics for a school, and starts to suspect a woman named Shenlü of spreading knowledge about abortion drugs. Then Suirei shows up with the resurrection formula, and Maomao disappears.

She left a coded message, Luomen reads it, and Jinshi goes after Suirei. Suirei has taken Maomao and Shisui, Maomao’s bug-obsessed friend from the palace, to a hot-spring village far from the capital. There Maomao finds out Suirei and Shisui are sisters. Back at the palace, Gyokuyou gives birth safely. Shenlü tries to take her own life, and Lahan, Lakan’s nephew, uncovers embezzlement and illegal iron trading.

At a harvest festival Shisui explains the fox masks the village uses, and Maomao finally gets the resurrection recipe. She and a boy named Kyou-u are caught in a hidden lab.

Loulan, the high consort, keeps Maomao alive by giving her a job, making an immortality drug. Loulan is Shisui. The bug-loving maid Maomao befriended was the Pure Consort in disguise the whole time. Inside the Shi clan’s stronghold Maomao learns how Loulan’s mother, Shenmei, took power there. Outside, Lakan pushes Jinshi to bring the Forbidden Army against the rebellion.

Maomao takes the punishment for something Kyou-u did and gets thrown into a pit full of venomous creatures. A bribed guard tells her about the gunpowder they’re making. Loulan blows up the factory and reveals that the clan’s children have been poisoned.

Shisui gives Maomao the hairpin Jinshi once gave her. Lakan sets off an avalanche to knock out the Shi armory, the royal guard storms the fortress, and Jinshi gets to Maomao. The Shi clan head, Shishou, is killed. Shenmei dies when her own weapon, which had been tampered with, goes off. Loulan dances one last time and is shot.

Afterward Maomao treats a scar Jinshi now has, and looks after the Shi children. Gyokuyou is made empress, and the court names a new crown prince. Shisui survived. She leaves the country under a new name, Tamamo.

Before Season 3

Maomao knows who Jinshi really is now, and the two of them are closer than either will admit. Gyokuyou is empress, which reshuffles the whole rear palace. The Shi clan is finished, and Shisui is somewhere overseas as Tamamo. And Lakan is Maomao’s father, which she would really prefer not to talk about.

The movie

There’s an original Apothecary Diaries movie opening in Japanese theaters on December 11, 2026. It’s a new story written by the light novel author, set between Seasons 2 and 3. Jinshi asks Maomao to look into the death of a mid-ranking concubine who died five years ago. There’s no date for it outside Japan yet.