[4][5][6] According to Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, Lao Ai had a giant penis, being of such size that it could be used as an axle for a wooden carriage.
[note 1][3] During the formative years of King Zheng's reign, Lü Buwei ended his affair with the Queen Dowager and gave Lao Ai to her.
Without popular support, military training, numbers, or sufficient organisation, Lao Ai's followers were quickly defeated.
Lao Ai was punished by being dismembered and torn apart by five horses and the Queen Dowager was imprisoned in her palace and her two allegedly illegitimate sons were killed.
Given that Sima Qian, author of the historical work that canonized this traditional account of Lao Ai, was himself subject to the punishment of castration some years before, skeptically minded historians believe that the story of Lao Ai is meant to be understood allegorically, as a "personified phallus" who represented "a basic threat to the transmission of the imperial bloodline and hence the purity of the 'united cosmos.