China's Last Eunuch

ralphrepo · Mar 26, 2009

It's easy to remember the Last Emperor. But so too, should we remember those that served the throne. We've all heard of palace eunuchs, the male servants of the imperial city that had to undergo hideous emasculation as the only means of becoming eligible for such service. They've elicited responses that ranged from revulsion to macabre fascination; piteous horror to adolescent snickering. Whatever one may personally think of them, their kind represented an era of China that is long gone. After the death of Sun YaoTing, the last of his kind, in 1996, his story was published in Chinese but is finally being released in English this year. I'm sure it will make rapt reading for any student of history, but especially for those of us Sinophiles that loved the late Qing.

In a rush? For a quick synopsis, just read the red highlighted lines.

China's last eunuch spills sex secrets
Mon Mar 16, 2009 10:01am EDT
By Emma Graham-Harrison

BEIJING (Reuters) - Only two memories brought tears to Sun Yaoting's eyes in old age -- the day his father cut off his genitals, and the day his family threw away the pickled remains that should have made him a whole man again at death. China's last eunuch was tormented and impoverished in youth, punished in revolutionary China for his role as the "Emperor's slave" but finally feted and valued, largely for outlasting his peers to become a unique relic, a piece of "living history."

He had stories of the tortuous rituals of the Forbidden City, Emperor Pu Yi's last moments there and the troubled puppet court run by the Japanese during the 1930s. He escaped back to the heart of a civil war, became a Communist official and then a target of radical leftists before being finally left in peace. This turbulent life has been recorded in the "The Last Eunuch of China" by amateur historian Jia Yinghua, who over years of friendship drew out of Sun the secrets that were too painful or intimate to spill to prying journalists or state archivists. He died in 1996, in an old temple that had become his home, and his biography was finally published in English this year.

It unveils formerly taboo subjects like the sex life of eunuchs and the emperor they served, the agonizing castrations often done at home and also often lethal, and the incontinence and shame that came with the promise of great power. "He was conflicted over whether to tell the secrets of the emperor," said Jia, adding that Sun preserved a loyalty to the old system because he had dedicated so much of his life to it. "I was the only person he trusted. He did not even confide in his family, after they threw away his 'treasure,'" Jia added, using traditional eunuchs' slang for their preserved genitals. They were discarded during the chaotic 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when having anything from the "old society" could put lives at risk. "He only cried about two things; when telling me about the castration and about the loss of his 'treasure'," said Jia, who works as an energy bureaucrat, but devotes all his spare time to chronicling the dying days of Imperial China after a childhood enthralled by the eunuchs and princes who were his neighbors.

STERILITY AND POWER

Over years of painstaking research, he has gleaned arcane details about every aspect of palace life, along with secrets about the emperor's sexuality and cruelty that would look at home on the front page of tabloid newspapers. For centuries in China, the only men from outside the imperial family who were allowed into the Forbidden City's private quarters were castrated ones. They effectively swapped their reproductive organs for a hope of exclusive access to the emperor that made some into rich and influential politicians. Sun's impoverished family set him on this painful, risky path in hopes that he might one day be able to crush a bullying village landlord who stole their fields and burned their house. His desperate father performed the castration on the bed of their mud-walled home, with no anesthetic and only oil-soaked paper as a bandage. A goose quill was inserted in Sun's urethra to prevent it getting blocked as the wound healed. He was unconscious for three days and could barely move for two months. When he finally rose from his bed, history played the first of a series of cruel tricks on him -- he discovered the emperor he hoped to serve had abdicated several weeks earlier.

"He had a very tragic life. He had thought it was worthwhile for his father, but the sacrifice was in vain," Jia said, in a house stacked with old books, newspapers and photos. "He was very smart and shrewd. If the empire had not fallen there is a high chance he would have become powerful," Jia added. The young ex-emperor was eventually allowed to stay in the palace and Sun had risen to become an attendant to the empress when the imperial family were unceremoniously booted out of the Forbidden City, ending centuries of tradition and Sun's dreams. "He was castrated, then the emperor abdicated. He made it into the Forbidden City then Pu Yi was evicted. He followed him north and then the puppet regime collapsed. He felt life had played a joke at his expense," Jia said. Many eunuchs fled with palace treasures, but Sun took a crop of memories and a nose for political survival that turned out to be better tools for surviving years of civil war and ideological turbulence that followed. "He never became rich, he never became powerful, but he became very rich in experience and secrets," Jia said.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE52E06H20090316?sp=true
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Biography of last Chinese eunuch reveals a tumultuous life
Castrated at 8, Sun Yaoting hoped for an imperial life of riches. Instead, he experienced palace intrigue, war, revolution, scorn and, finally, recognition.
By Barbara Demick
March 6, 2009

Sun Yaoting and his biographer, Jia Yinghua. In his final years, Sun was recognized as a rare living repository of history.

Reporting from Beijing -- Sun Yaoting was 8 when his father castrated him with a single swoop of a razor. The year was 1911, and China was in turmoil. Just a few months later rebels deposed the emperor, overturned centuries of tradition and established a republic. "Our boy has suffered for nothing," his father said, weeping and beating his breast, when he learned that the emperor had been overthrown. "They don't need eunuchs anymore!" Little did he know that the child nevertheless would earn a place in Chinese history. The imperial court was resuscitated long enough to give Sun a chance to serve the wife of the boy emperor Puyi -- a position that gave him the distinction of being the last eunuch to the last Chinese emperor.

After the Communists came to power in 1949, Sun and other surviving eunuchs were despised as freakish symbols of the feudal past. He was nearly killed during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, and his siblings were so fearful of persecution that they threw away his bao, or treasure: the severed genitals that eunuchs kept pickled in a jar so they could be buried as complete men. It was not until the final years of his life that Sun was recognized as a rare living repository of history. A biography based on hours of interviews in the years before his death in 1996 was recently translated into English. The book arrives as a museum dedicated to eunuchs, built around the tomb of a 16th century eunuch, is undergoing a major expansion. It is scheduled to reopen in May.

Whether the interest is prurient or scholarly, the curiosity is definitely there. Emasculation was thought to render eunuchs nonpersons, without ambition or ego, so their presence in the innermost sanctum of the imperial palace did not violate the emperor's privacy. "The eunuchs were very mysterious and in some ways more interesting than the emperors themselves," said Jia Yinghua, Sun's biographer. Jia met Sun when he was researching a book about Puyi, and recorded 100 hours of conversations with him. The biography, "The Last Eunuch of China: The Life of Sun Yaoting," contains everything you might want to know about the gruesome particulars of becoming a eunuch, along with much you probably would not want to know. Suffice it to say the boys went through excruciating pain without benefit of anesthesia (other than chile peppers in some cases). In addition to a lifetime of impotence, they often suffered incontinence in exchange for entry to the palace.

Sun was unusual: Inspired by an older eunuch from his village who had become rich, he decided for himself that he wanted to follow this path. But then the emperor was deposed and the castration had left him too weak for farm work. The emperor retained the trappings of power in the Forbidden City, however. Sun came to Beijing at age 14, still wearing the pigtail of Chinese boys at the time. He got a job with one of the emperor's uncles, and later with Puyi's wife. He followed the imperial family to Manchuria after Puyi was installed in 1932 as puppet emperor of a Japanese colonial state known as Manchukuo. Sun was privy to the court's most intimate secrets, the opium addiction and out-of-wedlock pregnancy of the emperor's first wife, Wanrong, and the emperor's ambivalence about his own sexuality. Sun later told his biographer that Puyi was less interested in his wife than in a particular eunuch who "looked like a pretty girl with his tall, slim figure, handsome face and creamy white skin." He recalled that the two were "inseparable as body and shadow."

After the Communists came to power, many of the eunuchs became penniless outcasts. A few drowned themselves in the moats of the Forbidden City. Sun, one of the few who was literate, got a job as caretaker of a temple, where he lived until his death. The recollections of an adopted son and a grandson, together with the biography, make him one of the most documented eunuchs of modern times. Scholars also will tell you about other eunuchs: Cai Lun was credited with inventing paper in AD 105. Zheng He became one of China's greatest explorers in the 15th century. But eunuchs are generally depicted in Chinese literature as conniving and greedy, the stock villains of many a palace intrigue.

The eunuch museum is in an overgrown cemetery with stone guardians and a tomb for the Ming dynasty eunuch Tian Yi, who died in 1602. Eunuchs were not permitted to be buried with their families, so several other favored eunuchs found their final resting place in Tian Yi's compound in the foothills of west Beijing. Hidden behind what had been an elementary school, the tombs somehow escaped destruction during the Cultural Revolution and were opened to the public in 1999. The expanded museum is to display paintings of eunuchs, a photo collection about Sun's life and other 20th century eunuchs, and items such as the curved knives used to castrate them. "The eunuchs are part of a long Chinese tradition that continues to this day in which the regular people had to do anything to serve the all-powerful central government," said Cui Weixing, a literary and cultural critic who has written about eunuchs. "Maybe that's why the Chinese government isn't so anxious to publicize anything about eunuchs. But it is a good start that we'll have this museum so that people can begin to learn."

Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-eunuchs6-2009mar06,1,6689455.story
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AMAZON.COM BOOK LINK CLICK HERE -clapclap

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And other links of related interest: -cool

China's Eunuch Museum - Eunuch's Retired Life - Good Eunuch Tian Yi - Top 10 Eunuchs In Ancient China

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cassie_wong · Mar 27, 2009

Wow, thanks for informing us about this!

hkconfused · Mar 27, 2009

I can't believe that's being on Reuters top 10 for like the past week.... Shows what people like to click on huh?

sars4tw · Apr 1, 2009

"Sun Yaoting was 8 when his father castrated him with a single swoop of a razor"
Poor guy....

zeewee · Apr 1, 2009

Oh my gosh...I was thinking of wanting to get my hands on the book, but find that it is 60 bucks (originally 90!)!!!! Why is it so expensive?

ralphrepo · Apr 1, 2009

zeewee said: ↑

Oh my gosh...I was thinking of wanting to get my hands on the book, but find that it is 60 bucks (originally 90!)!!!! Why is it so expensive?
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Just wait. If it's popular, a PDF or e-book version will always find their way onto the net. Best way to check is emule or the newsgroups.

Expensive books... Hmmmph... Knowledge should be free, it's the paper and ink that they zing you on...

psyduck215 · Apr 1, 2009

This book is so popular that its "Temporarily out of stock."

magicguitar · Apr 1, 2009

should be a good author to read up on.

zeewee · Apr 1, 2009

I mean...I've come across my share of expensive books (college text books mostly), but this is a paperback of 300 something pages! It must be printed on sheets of gold! Haha. Oh well...maybe I can find this at a book store and see exactly why it costs so much (tons of photos on photo paper, maybe?).

China's Last Eunuch

ralphrepo Well-Known Member

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