However, the punishment designated, which included a month in prison and 100 heavy blows, was actually the lightest punishment which existed in the Qing legal system. The Qing dynasty instituted the first law against consensual, non-monetized homosexuality in China. In later Ming Dynasty, homosexuality began to be referred to s the "southern custom" due to the fact that Fujian was the site of a unique system of male marriages, attested to by the scholar-bureaucrat Shen Defu and the writer Li Yu, and mythologized by in the folk tale, The Leveret Spirit.
ĭuring the Ming Dynasty, it is said that the Zhengde Emperor had a homosexual relationship with a Muslim leader named Sayyid Husain. During these dynasties, the general attitude attitude toward homosexuality was still tolerant, but male lovers started to get seen as less legitimate compared to wives and men are usually expected to get married and continue the family line. The following Song dynasty was the last dynasty to include a chapter on male companions of the emperors in official documents. With the rise of the Tang dynasty, China became increasingly influenced by the sexual morels of foreigners from Western and Central Asia, and female companions began to replace male companions in terms of power and familial standings.
However, except in unusual cases, such as Emperor Ai, the men named for their homosexual relationships in the official histories appear to have had active heterosexual lives as well. : 46 Scholar Pan Guangdan (潘光旦) came to the conclusion that many emperors in the Han dynasty had one or more male sex partners. : 32 The story of the cut sleeve(断袖) recorded the Emperor Ai of Han sharing a bed his lover, Dongxian (董賢) when Emperor Ai woke up later, he carefully cut off his sleeve, so as not to awake Dongxian, who had fallen asleep on top of it. In the story of the leftover peach(余桃), set during the Spring and Autumn Era the, the historian Han Fei recorded a anecdote in the relationship of Mi Zixia (彌子瑕) and Duke Ling of Wei (衛靈公) in which Mizi Xia shared an especially delicious peach with his lover. Ĭhinese literature recorded multiple anecdotes of man engaging in homosexual relationships. : 174 It is believed homosexuality was popular in the Song, Ming and Qing dynasties. Still, there are also descriptions of lesbians in some history books. In contrast, the role of women is given little positive emphasis in Chinese history, with records of lesbianism being especially rare. Confucianism, being primarily a social and political philosophy, focused little on sexuality, whether homosexual or heterosexual. Male homosexuality has been acknowledged in China since ancient times and was mentioned in many famous works of Chinese literature.