Xiaoyue, the 2.2-Metre Influencer Known for Her Height Gap With Her Boyfriend, Dies at 26
Xiaoyue, half of a Chinese online couple famous for the 52-centimetre difference between her 2.2-metre frame and her boyfriend's 1.68 metres, has died at 26 after a tumour condition her partner believed was operable. She leaves a child not yet one year old.
Xiaoyue, a Chinese internet personality who spent years documenting her life as the taller half of a couple famous for its 52-centimetre height difference, died in the early hours of 11 October at her home in Neijiang, Sichuan province. She was 26. Her partner, Zihao, announced the death in an obituary posted that day on the couple's account; it said that, at her own wish and her family's, there would be no memorial service and the funeral would be kept simple.
The couple — his 1.68 metres to her 2.2 — had been posting together since 2020, when she first began uploading ordinary daily vlogs and found an audience simply because of how tall she was. Their videos recorded a life lived in a world built for average bodies: doorways, buses, furniture, shopping trips, cooking in a small kitchen. The tag "most adorable height difference" (最萌身高差) carried them to 84,000 followers on her account and 139,000 on his, according to Red Star News' report on her death. Both were full-time content creators, based mostly in Chongqing, and they had been together four years; in October 2025 she gave birth to their child.
Attention of this kind in China's creator economy comes with an audience that polices authenticity, and bodies as unusual as hers invited disbelief. "A lot of people just assumed it was fake," Zihao told Red Star News after her death. "We never knew how to argue with that." He added that she had always been upbeat about it and unbothered by the doubters.
In July this year he revealed what was actually wrong. Examinations had found a pituitary tumour and a meningioma; Red Star reported that the diagnosis behind her height was pituitary giantism, in which a growth on the pituitary gland drives the body past its normal limits. Her blood sugar was running between 20 and 33 mmol/L, several times a healthy reading, and her kidneys were failing. The plan, Zihao said, was to operate once her blood sugar came under control. Doctors had told him the condition itself was "a very mild thing — a minimally invasive operation to take the tumour out of her head." She died before that operation could happen.
The response online has been from people who watched the pregnancy, then the illness, then the end. "Last year she gave birth; before the baby turned one, it has lost its mother forever," one longtime viewer wrote. A collage of the couple's videos, overlaid with captions like "2.2 metres of love" (2米2的爱情), has been circulating since the announcement.
Their last clips show her in a wheelchair in the courtyard of a brick farmhouse, her partner holding her steady — the kind of ordinary footage the two of them built a following on, filmed as her condition worsened. Zihao's last words to Red Star News were about the surgery that was supposed to come: "I never imagined this illness could take a person's life."