# 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.

## Origin
The Asianprince213 Geocities page went live in 1999, filled with self-portraits and text introducing the reader to an artist who supposedly dominated the Asian music scene[4]. The person actually operating the site never came forward publicly, leaving the writing voice as anonymous as the fabricated backstory.

On May 6, 2001, users of the Straight Dope Forums traced the photos back to Tuấn Anh, a real singer working out of California, pointing to a 1999 OC Weekly write-up on the artist as proof[1]. The Museum of Hoaxes and other reference sites confirmed the same finding in 2002, citing footage of Tuấn Anh performing live in Vietnam[3].

- **Platform:** Geocities (source) / forums and blogs (viral spread)
- **Creator:** Unknown
- **Date:** 1999

## 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