耽美
dan mei
This is a popoular internet phrase in the Chinese internet sphere. However, danmei is not originally a Chinese word. Instead, it came from Japan. It’s pronounced “tanbi” in Japanese and it was originally a Japanese translation of the European aestheticism style of Oscar Wilde and that type of writing.
This is actually a coded word used to describe certain boys’ love manga [comics depicting gay relationships] of the 1970s and 80s. And then it was then imported into Chinese through Taiwan and they call this danmei, but Japanese no longer call these kinds of writings and manga as tanbi.
So we see culture exchanges and misunderstandings and definition transformations just through this little word.