The Han Dynasty’s official histories record that Emperor Ai of Han once napped in the imperial chamber with his favorite, Dong Xian, sleeping on his sleeve. When the emperor needed to rise, he took a knife and cut the sleeve at the shoulder rather than wake the man he loved, then walked out barefoot, holding the severed cloth. The robe was stored with a hole in it, and the incident became so embedded in Chinese culture that, more than 2,000 years later, “cut sleeve” remains the polite literary term for two men in a relationship. That episode is only one of several named incidents that supplied classical Chinese with a permanent vocabulary for male imperial favorites: the bitten peach, the fashion of Long Yang, the shared bed, and the spring of An Ling.
Each phrase originates from a specific historical figure, and each of those figures eventually fell out of favor and died badly. Yet the phrasing survived in poetry and official documents for twenty centuries. The institution itself, known in technical terms as the “favored minions,” was documented in dedicated chapters of the official histories. Sima Qian, who wrote the Records of the Grand Historian after being castrated for defending a general in 99 BC, included a section called “The Lives of the Favorites.
” Ban Gu followed with his own version in the Book of Han a century later. These were official imperial documents, meaning every literate official in China for roughly two millennia had access to paragraphs naming the male lovers of previous emperors. The emperor’s favorites occupied a distinct category from wives and concubines, who could produce legal heirs. The favorite could not found a rival dynasty, making him structurally a safer choice than a powerful male relative.
The position, however, was inherently unstable: favor could cool at any moment, and the same act that was praised at the height of affection could become a capital offense once affection faded. The earliest of the founding stories involves Mizi Xia, favorite of Duke Ling of the state of Wei in the early 5th century BC. When Mizi Xia heard his mother was ill, he took one of the Duke’s chariots without permission, a technically capital offense, and rushed to her side. The Duke praised his filial devotion.
Another day, Mizi Xia bit into a peach, found it excellent, and handed the rest to the Duke, who was charmed by the gesture. When Mizi Xia’s looks faded, the same Duke executed him for the chariot and cited the half-eaten peach as evidence of insult. The philosopher Han Fei, who recorded the tale around 300 BC, used it to argue that royal favor is arbitrary: the facts never changed, only the Duke’s mood. From then on, “the bitten peach” became the standard literary phrase for a man whose lover lost interest.
The other founding story concerns Long Yang Jun, favorite of King Ai of Wei in the late 4th century BC. While fishing, Long Yang caught more than ten fish and began to weep, explaining that he was like the first small fish: delightful until a larger one appeared, then discarded. He warned the King that more beautiful men would come to court. The King, charmed, issued a proclamation that anyone recommending a more handsome courtier would be executed along with their entire family.
The phrase “the fashion of Long Yang” entered the language, and Long Yang Jun, unusually, lived a long and quiet life. During the Han Dynasty, the institution reached its golden age. The historian Bret Hinsch counted, in his 1990 study of the subject, that ten of the first thirteen Han emperors had at least one named male favorite in the official record, and some had several. Han China was straightforwardly bisexual at the elite level, and its historians simply wrote it down.
One of the most prominent of these favorites was Han Yan, the childhood study companion of Emperor Wu, who reigned from 141 to 87 BC. The two learned to write at the same desk as boys. Han Yan became commandant of the cavalry, rode with the emperor on hunts, and slept in the imperial chamber. Sima Qian recorded that Han Yan amassed wealth equivalent to a senior royal prince’s household.
After nearly two decades of success, he was accused of a liaison with one of the Empress Dowager’s ladies-in-waiting. The Empress Dowager ordered him to take poison, and the emperor chose his grandmother over his lover. Han Yan died holding his gold seal. The most famous of all favorites, Dong Xian, rose even faster.
Emperor Ai noticed him around 6 BC when Dong was a low-ranking court attendant. Within months Dong joined the imperial guard; within two years he was a marquis; within four, in 1 BC, he was made commander-in-chief of the Han armed forces, making him on paper the second most powerful person in the empire at age 22. The court objected not to the relationship but to the speed of the promotion and to the emperor’s plan to designate Dong as heir to the throne, which defied every Han succession rule. When Emperor Ai died in August 1 BC, the Grand Empress Dowager seized the imperial seal, stripped Dong of his titles within a day, and allowed him time to go home, where he and his wife took poison together.
He was 23. The Tang Dynasty, from 618 to 907 AD, kept the institution but changed the language, preferring the word “lover” to “favorite. ” Multiple Tang emperors had named male partners. The poet Bo Xingjian, around 800 AD, wrote the earliest surviving Chinese text explicitly devoted to same-sex love, listing Mizi Xia, Long Yang Jun, and Dong Xian as the tradition’s founding figures.
The essay survived only because a copy was sealed in a library cave at Dunhuang around 1000 AD and not reopened until 1900. The Ming Dynasty, from 1368 to 1644, formally banned sodomy in the imperial legal code for the first time, with penalties of flogging or penal servitude, but enforcement was nearly nonexistent. The Zhengde Emperor was famous for his male lovers, and provincial records from Fujian document local marriage-style ceremonies between older and younger men known as “contracted brothers. ” A 17th-century scholar wrote that the fondness could be found in every province of the empire.
The legal code was, in practice, a paper screen behind which the institution operated fully. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the institution had shifted form. The Manchu Qing emperors did not maintain a public favorite class the way the Han had, but the broader urban version of the institution flourished in Beijing’s opera district. Male performers known as dan actors, who specialized in female roles, became the centerpiece of upper-class nightlife.
Trained from boyhood in voice, poetry, calligraphy, and music, a successful dan could command an evening’s fee equal to a senior bureaucrat’s monthly salary. A genre of published handbooks called flower registers ranked the actors by beauty and talent and effectively served as directories to the industry, which everyone knew existed though almost no public document acknowledged it. The Qing sodomy law was finally repealed in 1907, just four years before the dynasty collapsed in the Republican Revolution. The repeal was part of a broader legal reform driven by Western pressure.
When the empire ended, the structures that had supported the institution for roughly 2,400 years ended with it. What survived was the vocabulary. China is unusual among ancient civilizations in that the institution disappeared but the language remained. The cut sleeve, the bitten peach, and the fashion of Long Yang stayed in use, and every educated Chinese reader knew which emperor and which lover each phrase referenced.
The public record was written by emperors and officials. The favorites themselves, almost without exception, did not write memoirs, so their interior lives remain mostly unrecoverable. What survives are the chariots, the peaches, the cut sleeves, and the names—and the knowledge that most of the famous favorites died young, in disgrace, or both. The robe with the hole ended up in the wardrobe.
The hole became a phrase. And the phrase outlived the dynasty.
