Hu Tianbao

Kevin P.

History

Hu Tianbao, also known as Tu’er Shen, is a deity that originated from Fujian Province in southeast China. He is the deity of male homosexuality, but his significance has been lost to time until recently. The tale of Hu Tianbao begins in Fujian Province in either the Ming Dynasty or Qing Dynasty. A soldier falls in love with a high-ranking official, and this soldier spies on the official from a bathroom stall to see him naked. However, the official became suspicious of this soldier, and he called the soldier in for questioning. There, the soldier admits his love for the official, but the official orders the soldier to be beaten to death.1 A month later, the soldier appears in the dream of the local village elder in the form of a young rabbit. The rabbit said that his death was due to offending the government official since his actions were immoral. However, the death was out of love, and the rabbit did not want it to be on the same level as any other crime. This rabbit was bestowed with the title, “God of the Rabbits,” and he watched over men who have relations with other men in the world. The rabbit spirit wished for a temple to be raised in his name.2 

In Fujian Province, it was acceptable for men to form a bond with each other known as qi.3 Thus, the villagers heard about this dream and built the temple, and Hu Tianbao became the patron deity of homosexuality. Like many gods of the Chinese pantheon, Hu Tianbao retained most of his human characteristics after becoming a deity exemplifying the phenomenon of humans becoming deified. These types of deity can include human characteristics like fallibility.4 

Connections to Society and Culture

In early modern China, historians could not really figure out the legal and social attitudes towards men who had relations with other men.5 Homosexuality was a touchy subject because it was not procreative, which goes against the core Confucian value of filial piety. Many of Hu Tianbao’s temples in Fujian Province were destroyed during the Ming and Qing Dynasty. This phenomenon was not unique, as the temples for other popular deities were also destroyed. Even images and statues of Confucius were removed from temples by the Jiajing Emperor during the Ming Dynasty.6 However, Hu Tianbao disappeared from the Chinese pantheon, which essentially constituted his second death. 

However in the present-day, Hu Tianbao is mainly celebrated in Taiwan, where the temple Weiming tang was constructed to the deity in 2007. Although the legalization of same-sex marriage in Taiwan did not occur until 2019, Taiwan has been relatively inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community. The Taiwanese LGBTQ+ community erected this temple in New Taipei City. 

Modern depictions of Hu Tianbao are seen in popular culture like in the American short film, Kiss of the Rabbit God, made in 2019. This short film depicts a human man falling in love with the human manifestation of Hu Tianbao. The introduction of the short film tells how Hu Tianbao answers “prayers of forbidden love.” The human man is a Chinese-American waiter, Matt, and the rabbit god, Shen, enters the restaurant and flirts with the waiter. Matt immediately becomes infatuated with Shen. In the end, Matt shows his devotion to the rabbit god by scarring himself with a knife, but none of it was real as he is transported back to the restaurant where he works.7 

Other representations of Hu Tianbao in popular culture include a Taiwanese drama called The Rabbit God Arranges Marriages (Tu’er shen nong yinyuan). In this series, Hu Tianbao not only is responsible for male-male relationships, but he is also a deity of female-female relationships. This is most likely to add more of a comedic effect to the series. Basically, he is adapted as a patron deity of homosexuality in general instead of a specific gender.

These two pieces of popular media represent Hu Tianbao as a trickster that likes to cause mischief on humans. Whether he is leading humans on or causing them to fall into romantic antics, he is shown to be happy to meddle with the affairs of other people. There is a more hands-on approach to Hu Tianbao rather than a one-way interaction of humans venerating him. These modern representations of the deity are for entertainment purposes and storytelling.

Roles

Hu Tianbao is venerated specifically for successful matchmaking in gay male relationships. The cult of Hu Tianbao began as part of a larger popular religious movement in China that approached gender and sex in ways that deviated from the Confucian family model promoted by the imperial state.8 The role of Hu Tianbao was to strengthen sexual bonding among marginalized people in Fujian Province.9 It also extends to protection of these types of male bonds as sodomizing, which was seen as heavily problematic, had a severe penalty if caught. This, however, has different conditions. If the sodomized boy is under 12, the penalty is execution by strangulation, while sodomizing with men over 12 is 100 strokes by a bamboo stick and one cangue to the mouth.10 

Images

The typical image of Hu Tianbao is of a leveret, or rabbit. This is due to the dream that the village elder had which is the usual image of the deity. Moreover, the word rabbit in Chinese, tuzi, is an insulting epithet for a male prostitute.11 This term is still used in present-day. On the other hand, there are other images from temples that have since been destroyed. In one of the closed temples of Hu Tianbao, one of the temple images shows an older man embracing a young male of fair skin.12 Furthermore, this iconography depicts this older man and younger boy as having sexual intercourse.13 These depictions of the cult of Hu Tianbao go back to the commonality of “sodomy” found in Fujian Province. Below is an image of an idol of Hu Tianbao with both human characteristics and traits of a rabbit, namely his ears. 

Notes

  1. Giovanni Vitiello, “The Dragon’s Whim: Ming and Qing Homoerotic Tales from ‘The Cut Sleeve’,” T’oung Pao 78, no. 4/5 (1992): 362, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4528573.  ↩︎
  2. Vitiello, “The Dragon’s Whim,” 362.  ↩︎
  3. Bret Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (University of California Press, 1992), 133.  ↩︎
  4. Arthur P. Wolf, “Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors,” in Studies in Chinese Society, ed. Arthur P. Wolf (Stanford University Press, 1978), 143.  ↩︎
  5. Michael Szonyi, “The Cult of Hu Tianbao and the Eighteenth-Century Discourse of Homosexuality,” Late Imperial China 19, no 1. (1998): 2.  ↩︎
  6. Julia K. Murray, “‘Idols’ in the Temple: Icons and the Cult of Confucius,” The Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 2 (2009): 385-386, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20619732.  ↩︎
  7. Andrew Huang, Kiss of the Rabbit God, 2019. ↩︎
  8. Matthew H. Sommer, “Was China Part of a Global Eighteenth-Century Homosexuality?,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 33, no. 1 (2007): 128, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41299404.  ↩︎
  9. Sommer, “Was China Part of a Global Eighteenth-Century Homosexuality?,” 129.  ↩︎
  10. Szonyi, “The Cult of Hu Tianbao,” 4.  ↩︎
  11. Szonyi, “The Cult of Hu Tianbao,” 7.  ↩︎
  12. Sommer, “Was China Part of a Global Eighteenth-Century Homosexuality?,” 128.  ↩︎
  13. Szonyi, “The Cult of Hu Tianbao,” 1.  ↩︎

Bibliography

Hinsch, Bret. Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Huang, Andrew, director. Kiss of the Rabbit God. Collider, 2019. 15 min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmCw-e72zs8. 

Murray, Julia K. “‘Idols’ in the Temple: Icons and the Cult of Confucius.” The Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 2 (2009): 371–411. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20619732. 

Sommer, Matthew H. “Was China Part of a Global Eighteenth-Century Homosexuality?” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 33, no. 1 (2007): 117–33. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41299404. 

Szonyi, Michael. “The Cult of Hu Tianbao and the Eighteenth-Century Discourse of Homosexuality.” Late Imperial China 19, no. 1 (1998): 1-25. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/late.1998.0004.

Vitiello, Giovanni. “The Dragon’s Whim: Ming and Qing Homoerotic Tales from ‘The Cut Sleeve.’” T’oung Pao 78, no. 4/5 (1992): 341–72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4528573. 

Wolf, Arthur P. “Gods, Ghosts, and Ancestors.” In Studies in Chinese Society, ed. Arthur P. Wolf, 131-182. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978.