# Asian Prince

Asian Prince, also known as Asianprince213 or Wo-Hen Nankan, was a Geocities hoax page from 1999 featuring glamour photos of a mustached Asian man posing as a boastful pop star. The site drew international attention through the early 2000s before being exposed as fake, with the photos actually belonging to Vietnamese-American singer Tuấn Anh.

## Overview
Asian Prince, whose full handle was Asianprince213, was a fictional online personality built around a Geocities fan page from 1999[4]. The page mixed glamour portraits of a mustached Asian man with journal entries written from the point of view of a wildly successful Asian pop star. The subject's fashion sense drew comparisons to American rock figures like Prince and Little Richard, all frilled shirts and heavy makeup.

The persona also went by 'Wo-Hen Nankan,' a Chinese Mandarin phrase meaning 'I am so ugly' (translated from Chinese Mandarin). The boastful voice of the diary entries, matched against the theatrical portraits, made the page instantly quotable on early 2000s message boards[1]. The man in the photos had no involvement with the site; his identity was pinned on Vietnamese-American singer Tuấn Anh based in California[3].

## How It Spread
Asian Prince first spread internationally, showing up on Japanese and South Korean blogs and message boards around 2000, well before the English-speaking web caught on[4]. On the English side, the page began circulating in 2001. The World Losers Consortium added Asian Prince to its 'Players' roster on May 13, 2001[5]. On January 28, 2002, a BeyondUnreal Forum member started an off-topic thread titled 'The sexy and rebel Asian Prince is here'[6].

Excerpts from the diary entries turned into copypasta gags on forums, and small fan sites sprang up hosting Asian Prince desktop wallpapers and Winamp skins[1]. By June 2002, the operator wiped the original content and replaced the homepage with a short farewell message. The site was archived at least 76 times by the Wayback Machine in 2004 alone, showing the joke was still alive years after the exposure[2].

New diary entries were reportedly added until 2005, when the account holder shifted operations to a MySpace profile. Copycat blogs and profiles using the same photos kept the character in circulation on the mid-2000s web[3].

## How to Use
Asian Prince is typically referenced through out-of-context quotes lifted from the original Geocities diary entries, used as copypasta to mock over-the-top self-promotion. Fans also commonly passed around the portrait shots as reaction images and built small tribute pages hosting wallpapers or Winamp skins based on them[1].

## Frequently Asked Questions
### What is Asian Prince?
Asian Prince, or Asianprince213, was a fictional online personality launched on a 1999 Geocities page featuring glamour photos of a mustached Asian man posing as a wildly successful pop star[4].

### Where did Asian Prince come from?
The Geocities page for Asianprince213 went online in 1999, and the photos were later traced by Straight Dope Forums users to Vietnamese-American singer Tuấn Anh living in California[1].

### What does Asian Prince mean?
The character also went by the Mandarin nickname 'Wo-Hen Nankan,' meaning 'I am so ugly' (translated from Chinese Mandarin), a self-deprecating counterpoint to the boastful diary entries[4].

### How do you use Asian Prince?
Fans typically shared out-of-context quotes from the diary entries as forum copypasta and passed around portrait-based wallpapers and Winamp skins on tribute sites[1].

### Is Asian Prince still popular?
The joke faded after the mid-2000s as Geocities wound down, but the page was archived at least 76 times by the Wayback Machine in 2004, showing its reach at the height of the hoax[2].

## References
1. [https://boards.straightdope.com/](<https://boards.straightdope.com/>)
2. [https://web.archive.org/web/*/geocities.com/asianprince213](<https://web.archive.org/web/*/geocities.com/asianprince213>)
3. [http://hoaxes.org/](<http://hoaxes.org/>)
4. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/asianprince213](<https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/asianprince213>)
5. [http://losers.org/](<http://losers.org/>)
6. [https://forums.beyondunreal.com/](<https://forums.beyondunreal.com/>)

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Source: https://meme.com/memes/asian-prince
Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library