Explanation: Mainland China under Chairman Xi Jinping has charted a regressive course on the subject of LGBT rights, decrying it as foreign and, especially, Western, reversing hard-fought gains in tolerance from the Chinese government since the late 2000s.

… but traditionally, China has a long history of toleration of homosexuality, as while traditional pre-modern Chinese culture may not have been gay-friendly in the modern sense, it also was not expressly hostile towards homosexuality.

The incident depicted comes from the Han Dynasty, the second and arguably most influential dynasty of Imperial China

Historians characterize the relationship between Emperor Ai and his male lover Dong Xian as “the passion of the cut sleeve” (斷袖之癖, duànxiù zhī pì) after a story that one afternoon after falling asleep for a nap on the same bed, Emperor Ai cut off his own sleeve, which Dong Xian was asleep on, rather than disturb him when he had to get out of bed. Dong was noted for his relative simplicity contrasted with the highly ornamented court, and was given progressively higher and higher posts as part of the relationship, eventually becoming the supreme commander of the armed forces by the time of Emperor Ai’s death.[25]

It was also during this period that one of the first mentions of female homosexuality surfaced. A historian in the Eastern Han dynasty, Ying Shao, made observations regarding several Imperial Palace women forming homosexual attachments with one another, in a relationship titled duishi (對食, a term interpreted to refer to reciprocal cunnilingus), in which the two acted as a married couple.[21]