The official has the soldier tortured and killed, but he returns from the dead in the form of a leveret (a hare in its first year) in the dream of a village elder.
[2]According to What the Master Would Not Discuss, written by Yuan Mei during the Qing dynasty, Tu'er Shen was a man named Hu Tianbao (胡天保) who fell in love with a very handsome imperial inspector of Fujian Province.
One month after Hu Tianbao's death, he appeared to a man from his hometown in a dream, claiming that since his crime was one of love, the underworld officials decided to right the injustice by appointing him the god and safeguarder of homosexual affections.
The sense that the villagers must keep the reason for the temple secret in the story may relate to pressure from the central Chinese authorities to abandon the practice.
Qing dynasty official Zhu Gui (1731–1807), a grain tax circuit intendant of Fujian in 1765, strove to standardize the morality of the people with a "Prohibition of Licentious Cults".
All those debauched and shameless rascals who on seeing youths or young men desire to have illicit intercourse with them pray for assistance from the plaster idol.
[3]Although Tu'er Shen is popularly revered by some temples, some Taoist schools may have considered homosexuality as sexual misconduct throughout history, probably deeming it to be outside of marriage.
[6] The story may be an attempt to mythologize a system of male marriages in Fujian attested to by the scholar-bureaucrat Shen Defu and the 17th century writer Li Yu.
[10] In 2006, a Taoist priest by the name of Lu Wei-ming founded a temple for Tu'er Shen in Yonghe District in the New Taipei City in Taiwan.