'Jinjiang Literature City'), was founded in 2003 and has since amassed 7 million registered users and over 500,000 titles.
The largest of these, Jìnjiāng Wénxuéchéng ( Chinese: 晋江文学城 lit. While early online danmei communities were largely run by amateur fans of the genre, those websites were gradually supplanted by a slew of commercial online fiction websites founded in the early 2000s. 1999 also saw the founding of the first print magazine devoted to danmei, Danmei Season, which was published continuously until 2013 despite not having an official permit to do so. These venues started as communities for Chinese fans of Japanese BL, but soon began hosting fanworks and original danmei stories by young Chinese women. The term danmei is borrowed from the Japanese word tanbi ( 耽美, 'the pursuit of beauty'), and Chinese fans often use danmei and BL interchangeably.īy 1999 several online danmei forums had been founded. The male same-sex romance genre of 'boys' love', or BL, originated in Japanese manga in the early 1970s, and was introduced to mainland China via pirated Taiwanese translations of Japanese comics in the early 1990s.
