How to Read Chinese Manhua in English Without Waiting for Translations

You found a manhua you love. The cover art is gorgeous, the cultivation plot has 800 chapters of build-up, and the official English release stopped 200 chapters ago. Or never started. The raw version updates every week on a Chinese site you can’t read.

This is the normal experience for Chinese manhua readers in 2026. The catalogue is massive, the translation pipeline is tiny, and most of what’s actually being published in China will never get an English version.

Here’s where the official options sit, why the gap is so big, and what you can do about it today.

Where can you read Chinese manhua in English officially?

A handful of platforms publish licensed manhua in English:

Bilibili Comics (bilibilicomics.com) — the biggest legal option. Hundreds of titles, vertical scroll, free with ads or a subscription. Series like Heaven Official’s Blessing and The Founder of Diabolism live here.
INKR — hosts Kuaikan and a rotating catalogue of licensed manhua and webtoons.
MangaToon — broader Asian comics platform with a strong manhua section.
WebComics and Tappytoon — smaller catalogues, some manhua mixed in with manhwa.

Start here. If your series is on one of these, you’re done. Read it legally, support the author, move on.

The problem is what isn’t there.

Why most Chinese manhua never gets translated

China publishes more comic chapters per week than any English company can keep up with. Kuaikan alone gets over 10 million monthly visitors and runs thousands of original titles. Tencent Comics (ac.qq.com) has a catalogue measured in tens of thousands of series. Bilibili Comics has translated a slice of that, but most of it sits permanently in Chinese.

Even when a series does get licensed, the gap between the Chinese release and the English chapter is usually months. Translation isn’t the slow part. Licensing, lettering, quality review, and platform scheduling are. By the time chapter 400 hits English, chapter 600 is already out in Chinese.

So if you’re reading something off the beaten path, like a niche xianxia, a BL manhua that hasn’t been licensed, or a long-running cultivation epic the publishers skipped, you’re stuck with the raws.

How to read raw manhua on Chinese sites

The major raw sources, all free, all in Chinese:

Kuaikan Manhua (kuaikanmanhua.com) — modern, mobile-first, lots of shoujo and romance
Tencent Comics / AC.QQ (ac.qq.com) — biggest catalogue, action and fantasy heavy
Bilibili Manhua (manga.bilibili.com) — overlaps with their English platform but has the full Chinese library
DMZJ and Manhuagui — aggregator-style, useful for older or obscure titles

You can sign up for most of these with an email. Some titles are locked behind a Chinese phone number, but most aren’t.

Then comes the actual problem. You can see the art. You can’t read the words.

Translating Chinese manhua yourself

The old workflow was screenshot, crop, paste into Google Translate, squint at the result. It works for a panel. It falls apart at chapter scale, especially with Chinese, because the OCR has to deal with vertical text, stylised fonts, dense bubbles, and a writing system that doesn’t have spaces.

A browser extension changes the workflow. Fakey is a Chrome extension that translates the page you’re looking at in place. You open Kuaikan, Tencent, or any manhua reader, click translate, and the Chinese text gets replaced with English on top of the original art. Both Simplified and Traditional Chinese are handled. It works the same way for Japanese manga and Korean manhwa, so if you read across all three (like a lot of readers do), one tool covers everything.

It isn’t the same as a polished scanlation. A human translator catches cultivation terms, sect names, and wordplay better than any AI. But for keeping up with a series you’d otherwise abandon, the trade is worth it. The free plan covers casual reading. Fakey Premium removes the daily limit if you’re powering through a backlog.

On the Chrome Web Store, Fakey sits at around 4.8 stars across roughly 270 ratings, with 10,000+ active users. (Confirm current numbers from your region before quoting them.)

If you’ve already tried this approach with Korean comics, the workflow is identical. We covered that in how to read Korean manhwa without knowing a single word of Korean.

Try it on the series you’ve been waiting for

Pick the manhua that stalled out in English. Find it on Kuaikan or Tencent. Install Fakey from the Chrome Web Store and read the chapter you’ve been blocked on. The whole loop takes about two minutes.

FAQ

Is it legal to read raw manhua on Kuaikan and Tencent? Yes. These are official Chinese publishers. You’re reading the source. Using a translator extension on top is the same as using Google Translate on a Chinese news site.

Does Fakey work with vertical-scroll manhua? Yes. It translates each panel as you scroll past it, which is how most modern manhua is laid out.

What about Traditional Chinese versus Simplified? Both are supported. Most mainland sites use Simplified. Some Taiwan and Hong Kong releases use Traditional.

Can I use Fakey on mobile? The Chrome extension is desktop. There’s a separate Android app if you want to translate on your phone.

Why don’t English platforms just license more manhua? Volume and risk. There are thousands of ongoing series in China. Picking which ones will earn back the licensing and translation cost is hard, so platforms stick to proven names with anime adaptations or novel tie-ins.