4. A Han Emperor’s Unexpected Horrible Brood
Ancient China’s Emperor Jing of Han (reigned 157 BC – 141 BC) crushed feudal aristocrats who tried to run their fiefdoms as independent realms, and consolidated imperial control of China. All in all, his reign was a good one, and he governed with a light hand. He lowered taxes, lifted other burdens from commoners, and paved the way for the Han Dynasty to reach a pinnacle under his successors. In his own household, however, Emperor Jing raised some depraved monsters who would have gotten kicked off Tinder. First of those was Prince Tuan, who had some serious sexual hangups. That had some serious consequences, because one of the main tasks of a royal prince was to ensure the continuity of the dynasty, and to do that, he had to sire sons.
The problem was that Prince Tuan simply could not get it up with his wives and concubines. He suffered what Chinese texts described as a “withering of his potency”. Tuan became physically ill whenever he had to approach a woman. The man was homosexual, but he nonetheless had an obligation to impregnate his women and continue the imperial line. The tensions eventually got too much, and got to him. He had a boy lover, but his lover was bisexual and also liked the ladies – particularly Prince Tuan’s ladies of the harem, whose needs the prince did not satisfy. When Tuan found out that his boy lover was also loving his harem ladies, he failed to see it as a win-win that relieved him of a task he neither wanted to nor could perform. Instead, he choked his lover to death with his bare hands.
