Tu'er Shen

Lore & Background

According to a folk tale from 17th-century Fujian, a soldier fell in love with a provincial official and spied on him to see him naked. The official had the soldier tortured and killed, but the soldier returned from the dead in the form of a leveret (a hare in its first year) in the dream of a village elder. The leveret demanded that local men build a temple to him where they could burn incense in the interest of 'affairs of men.' The villagers contributed money to erect the temple, keeping the reason secret from outsiders.

Reader's Guide

Tu'er Shen's significance lies in his role as a rare Chinese deity explicitly associated with homosexual love. The cult of Hu Tianbao was targeted for extermination by the Qing government, and Qing official Zhu Gui (1731–1807) sought to suppress it as a 'licentious cult,' describing images of two men embracing and rituals involving prayers for homosexual encounters. The story may mythologize a system of male marriages in Fujian, where older men (qixiong) paid a bride price for younger men (qidi) in ceremonies resembling heterosexual weddings. In modern times, a temple for Tu'er Shen was founded in Yonghe District, New Taipei City, Taiwan in 2006, attracting roughly 9,000 gay pilgrims each year. As of 2020, it remains the only extant shrine to the deity, as the original temple in Fujian has not been rebuilt. The deity has appeared in media such as the Taiwanese drama The Rabbit God's Matchmaking and the American Gods episode 'The Rapture of Burning.'

Did You Know?

• Tu'er Shen's name literally means 'rabbit deity,' and a slang term for homosexuals in late imperial China was 'rabbits.'
• The deity is based on a man named Hu Tianbao, who was sentenced to death by beating for peeping on an imperial inspector he loved.
• Qing official Zhu Gui described the cult's image as 'two men embracing one another; the face of one is somewhat hoary with age, the other tender and pale.'
• As of 2020, the only extant shrine to Tu'er Shen is in Yonghe District, New Taipei City, Taiwan, founded in 2006.