← Back to the front page

The Dark Side of Great Historic Figures

Khalid Elhassan December 11, 2020 33 min

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony - Elizabeth Cady Stanton — Susan B. Anthony, left, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. NJTV

25. One of This Emperor’s Sons Choked a Lover to Death With His Bare Hands

Still from a movie depicting Emperor Jing. YouTube

Emperor Jing might have been great, but his sons were not. Prince Tuan was gay and had no taste for women. Nonetheless, he still had an obligation to continue the imperial line by impregnating at least some of his wives or concubines. The tension eventually got too much, and got to him. Prince Tuan had a boy lover, but his lover was bisexual and also liked the ladies. Especially Prince Tuan’s ladies of the harem, whose needs the prince was doing nothing to satisfy.

When Prince Tuan found out that his boy lover was also loving his harem ladies, he failed to see it as a win-win, relieving him of a task he was neither willing nor able to perform. Instead, he flew into a rage and choked his boy lover to death with his bare hands. He was not the worst of his brothers.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.