Japan's tradition of stories about passionate bonds between girls is older than any of these words. It reaches back to the "Class S" school stories of the 1910s and 1920s — Yoshiya Nobuko's Yaneura no Nishojo (1919) most famously — where the white lily was already part of the scenery. The name arrived half a century later. In 1976, Itō Bungaku, editor of Barazoku, Japan's first commercial gay men's magazine, opened a readers' column called "Yurizoku no Heya" — the Lily Tribe's Room — setting the lily against the rose of his magazine's title. The word then wandered for two decades, through personal-ad columns and fan slang, before it settled onto fiction about love between women.

What turned a wandering word into a named genre was a boom. Maria-sama ga Miteru, Oyuki Konno's novel series set in a Catholic girls' school (from 1998), gave yuri its modern template — and its 2004 anime carried that template to a much larger audience, in Japan and far beyond it. Commercial publishing moved in step: in 2003, Yuri Shimai became the first magazine devoted entirely to yuri; after it folded, Ichijinsha relaunched it in 2005 as what is now Comic Yuri Hime, still running today. These are the years when "yuri" settled into broad use as the genre's name — a shelf Japanese readers could finally ask for by name.

2004 was the year yuri broke through on Japanese TV — Maria-sama ga Miteru, Kannazuki no Miko, Mai-HiME — and Sinophone fans kept pace almost in real time, through volunteer groups recording and subtitling each episode. Baihe fans were scattered across big ACG forums, so in late 2004 a group of them built a home of their own: Yamibo (百合会), named after the "Mountain Lily Council" of Maria-sama ga Miteru.
In retrospect, 2004 was a significant year for Sinophone baihe. Yamibo grew into the largest Chinese-language baihe community, drawing fans from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, and its translation energy helped push Taiwanese publishers into dedicated yuri imprints by 2006. This era was not merely a prelude while built the readership, the vocabulary, and the archive that everything later stood on.

Stories about love between women had appeared on Jinjiang since the early 2000s, but writers often had to place them under danmei and add “GL” to the title so readers could find them. In 2010, after years of requests from writers and readers, Jinjiang made baihe a searchable category of its own.
That change gave baihe fiction a clearer place to grow. Authors could write for a recognised readership, readers could find more stories together, and the category gradually developed a distinctive presence within Chinese web fiction. Baihe reached full structural parity with danmei on Jinjiang in April 2024.

Baihe soon spread beyond web fiction. Forums, Tieba groups, Weibo accounts, and Bilibili became places to recommend stories, share resources, make fan edits, and discuss relationships between women. Other social media accounts also brought the word into conversations about lesbian life and community.
At the same time, baihe was developing into a connected cultural ecosystem. Stories moved between fiction, comics, audio, video, and games, while fan communities helped readers discover, discuss, reinterpret, and circulate them. New forms of production and fan participation grew alongside each other, giving baihe a wider presence across Chinese digital culture.

By the 2020s, baihe had become a familiar way for Chinese-speaking fans to discuss stories about women loving women, including GL works from other countries.
Its local culture also continued to expand. More creators, formats, communities, and routes of discovery emerged around baihe, connecting original work with fan discussion and independent creation. Together, they made baihe more visible and accessible to a wider range of readers.