Sun Yaoting took off his clothes and lay down on the bed. At the age of nine, he lay still as his father tied his hands and feet with rope. Then he fainted. The pain he felt when his father cut off his penis and testicles with one violent swing of a curved knife was unbearable. For three days he did not recover, but he became what he hoped would open the door to a better life – a eunuch. For one of the four sons of poor parents, sacrificing his sexual organs in exchange for a comfortable life at court was perfectly acceptable. But he was unlucky – less than a year after he disfigured his body for life to serve Emperor Pu Yi, China’s imperial rule came to an end in 1911.
But when he woke up from unconsciousness, hope was the only thing that gave him the strength to endure the excruciating pain that racked his body for eight weeks. He could not even stand up, and for the next few months he walked with difficulty, although by then the pain was a little less piercing.
He experienced what Ma Deqing had experienced before him: ‘I was nine years old. It was around 1906. One day my father managed to persuade me to lie on the bed. He castrated me by his own hand. It was a truly harrowing and terrifying experience. I can’t even remember exactly how many times I was disfigured.”
He almost never spoke about what he had experienced. “Not because I was shy, but because it was far too painful. Imagine: in those years, anaesthesia, needles or drugs to control blood flow were not available. And now imagine the pain inflicted on a restless child when he was pressed against the bed and his yaoming de qiguan (organ of life) was cut from his body! Every single vein was connected to my heart and I almost burst it out in such pain.”
Sun Yaoting suffered similarly, but he accepted the pain as something that would benefit him in life and, when he recovered, looked forward to the future with hope. He was the only one who could save his family. The elder brother was working in France, the younger two were too young to be taken in or to help the family in any other way. The money for Sun’s different future was simply not there.
“My father didn’t have the money to become an apprentice. It took up to four years to become a carpenter, and my father couldn’t afford it. So he did what he had to do,” Sun recounted, aged 84 and living in Beijing.
A father castrated his son, even though his wife was against it and he knew full well that he might lose him. Many did not survive the procedure. They did not recover from the extensive blood loss or were killed by infections from the incision. So could Suna. His father removed his genitals at home, in a clay hut that didn’t even have chilli to give him, even though it was the only anaesthetic at the time to help boys and men endure the pain. Bandages to dress the wound and stop the heavy bleeding were not even thought of. They soaked paper in oil and placed it on the wound, before inserting a goose feather into the boy’s ureter to prevent it from becoming overgrown.
They didn’t threaten anything, they just did it
The procedure was well known, having been practised in China for more than three thousand years, even though the first eunuchs did not voluntarily renounce their masculinity. The idea that men could have their genitals cut off was first suggested by military commanders looking for a way to retaliate or punish their enemies. Sometimes, it is said, they castrated an entire defeated tribe, an act tantamount to genocide.
Once castration had taken root in military life, it was transferred to civilian life. It became part of the punishment, revenge or humiliation of servants and weaker rivals, although the Chinese have long adhered to the rule that you must never castrate a member of your own ethnic group. The only problem was that the borders of the empire were changing so fast that no one knew who was ‘our’ and who was ‘foreign’ anymore, and they had no problem castrating, for example, the inhabitants of the northern provinces of China, an excellent source of new eunuchs to work at court.
A lot of them came from there, not least because they were extremely poor. That was their advantage. If they brought poor foreigners into the court, they could not associate with the local population and could not intrigue. These would have been extremely dangerous for the Emperor, because the eunuchs were, after all, the chosen ones, who saw and knew what even high-ranking civil officials did not.
According to Chinese belief, the emperor was the son of God and had to live in accordance with the moral forces that determined the workings of the universe. He was the one who linked heaven and earth, maintaining harmony, the balance of the universe and ensuring the well-being of all his subjects. For the Chinese, the gulf between him and the Emperor was as deep as the gulf between earth and heaven.
As the Emperor was in direct contact with the Divine, he was never allowed to reveal who he really was to those he ruled. They were not allowed to see his human qualities and weaknesses, so his court was the only one in which he could afford to be who he really was.
But even there, he needed care. If he had hired a regular maid, she might have been able to expose him. Who could then look after him, his wife and their multitude of concubines? The eunuchs jumped in. Poor foreigners without sexual organs, often illiterate, were given the privilege of seeing the Emperor “naked”. They became his link to the outside world and his company.
“They waited for me while I ate, dressed and slept. They accompanied me on my walks and during my lessons. They told me stories. I rewarded them and punished them, but they never left my side. They were my slaves and they were my first teachers”, the last Chinese Emperor Pu Yi later wrote about the eunuchs he lived with.
As they had no genitals, they were also safe guardians of the harem. Some emperors had a hundred concubines, no emperor could live without a thousand of them by his side, and they were all served by eunuchs. Ordinary men would have succumbed to the temptation, but the eunuchs could not, even though sexual relations between them and the emperor’s wives were supposedly neither rare nor secret. Why did the emperors not get more upset then? Because the eunuchs could not beget a child, and the emperor did not have to worry about any of his offspring not of his own blood.
Emperors were not immune. Sun Yaoting reported that the last Emperor of China, Pu Yi, was not much interested in his wife Wan Rong, who came to court in 1922 at the age of 16. Even on his wedding night, he left her alone, but he thoroughly enjoyed the company of his eunuch, who “with his tall, slender figure, handsome face and creamy white complexion, looked like a girl”. The pair were said to be “as inseparable as body and shadow”.
But this was just one eunuch in a crowd of those who surrounded the Emperor, and those he did not even know existed. At court, eunuchs did almost everything: they carried the emperor’s litter and water to the house, they were gardeners and guards, cooks and butlers, servants and priests, they provided entertainment and performed in plays, they were scholars and warriors. During the Qing dynasty, which ended with Pu Yi in 1911, their jobs were divided into 48 classes, with some jobs being more and others less valued and, above all, not all jobs were equally lucrative.
Not that the Emperor was more generous to some than to others, but some eunuchs fared better than others. Since they were almost the Emperor’s only contact with the world, anyone who wanted to communicate a message to the Emperor had to make sure they got it across. They were charged for their mediation and recovered considerably financially, provided, of course, that they managed to get close enough to the Emperor.
They were constantly in each other’s hair because of it. They competed with each other, and the Confucian scholars in particular had them in their teeth. They despised them and resented the influence they had on the Emperor, because they could not accuse the Emperor of letting himself be led around by the nose – the Emperor was, after all, the son of God, and the son of God is infallible.
As many eunuchs as I have, so many am I
This is also why Chinese historians have always referred to eunuchs as a “necessary evil”. They have been ridiculed or belittled, accused of greed, insistence and timidity, and of being undisciplined and unable to control themselves. For them they were scapegoats who were always blamed for everything that went wrong, because they just could not write that the eunuchs got power because their master, the emperor, the son of God, was incompetent.
The eunuch Xiao Dezhang also became rich and influential, although he was born poor as a church mouse in a village adjacent to Sun Yaoting’s. One day, when he came home, he was chatting with a little boy. His influence and power so fascinated Sun that he voluntarily decided to become a eunuch, so as soon as his father granted him his wish in his own handwriting, he began to look for a way to come to the Lost City.
At that time, 1200 eunuchs worked there. Many? No, very few compared to the golden times, such as those at the end of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when there were around 70,000 eunuchs in the palace and another 30,000 in the provinces. This was also the period when the eunuchs were the richest and most influential, and the political stability of the empire depended to a large extent on them.
Sun Yaoting did not have such high ambitions, but it came as a shock when the shocking news reached his ears in 1911 – Emperor Pu Yi had resigned. “Our boy has suffered in vain. They don’t need any more eunuchs!” his father despaired. He cried and beat his chest, but soon calmed down. The emperor was no longer ruling, but he was allowed to stay in the palace and keep his people, so there was still hope for his son. Nevertheless, it was to be another five years before Sun Yaoting, aged 14, finally arrived in Beijing. He could not reach the Emperor, but after a while he got a job with his uncle.
During the Qing Dynasty, to which Pu Yi belonged, only members of the imperial family and certain hereditary princes whose ancestors had distinguished themselves in the establishment of the dynasty were allowed to employ eunuchs. But even they were subject to strict rules. The Emperor was allowed to employ 3,000 eunuchs for his own needs, his sons and daughters were allowed 30 each, his grandsons 10 each, hereditary princes 20, and so on. The number of eunuchs employed determined the social status of the one who employed them, but he had to have exactly as many as was specified. If he employed fewer, he lost his status because he was obviously no longer able to support them.
So Sun Yaoting first came to the Emperor’s uncle, then worked for one of the Emperor’s concubines, and finally ended up with Empress Wan Rong. “She was very kind. She never beat her servants. I used to bring her cigarettes and tea. Sometimes we would go for a walk with her or play games,” Sun later recalled the times he spent with her. He was lucky, because the Emperor treated his eunuchs extremely badly.
The seven years he spent at court were so precious to him that he remained loyal to the Emperor until the end of his life, even though his life changed drastically again in 1924. The imperial family was thrown out of the palace by the warlord Fen Yuciang. “In the absence of the Emperor, we poor eunuchs had nothing to live on. We collected some money and lived in a palace we called the Temple of the Eunuchs.”
But life there was hard. “Because we were so poor, we couldn’t even afford coal to keep warm in winter.” To survive, he started to look after a Buddhist temple, and until his death in 1996, he had only one regret – that he had lost his “treasure”.
Precious treasure for sale
The “treasure” of the eunuchs was their sexual organs, which, after being cut off, were put into a jar of alcohol. The eunuch was never allowed to lose it. First, because he had to show the jar with his sexual organs to be accepted for a job at court, and then because he had to be buried with them. For they believed that the eunuch would be reborn as a “whole” man only if he was buried with them, otherwise in his new life he would be a “cat or a dog”, as Sun Yaoting often joked would be the fate that awaited him.
If I had lived a century or two earlier, I could have easily fixed my problem with money, because sex organs were then a lucrative trade item. Legend has it, for example, that a man lost his entire fortune in a gambling scrape. When he tried to sell his sneakers, the seller explained that he could not get as much money for them as he needed. “But I have nothing but my balls!” the man replied. “These will be good too,” laughed the shopkeeper.
The man went home and returned to the shop. He undressed in front of the shopkeeper and cut off his genitals in one fell swoop. He immediately fainted and the shopkeeper, who had not meant what he said, stood there in shock. Then panic seized him. He ran to the first eunuch and called for help, because only eunuchs are supposed to know what to do at such moments.
The eunuch knew this, but the man died anyway. Whether his genitals were sold for big bucks to a family desperate to bury their loved one with them is unknown. Traditionally, it did not matter whose penis and testicles they were, only that they were in the grave.
Interested buyers were also eunuchs who had lost their “treasure” but needed it to get a job at court, and fake eunuchs, of which there were reportedly quite a few. When applying for a job, they had to prove their eligibility with foreign sexual organs.
Dr Robert Coltman, personal physician to the Chinese imperial family, reported six patients who came to him around 1890 with urinary tract problems. They were all eunuchs and, like most others, they could not avoid problems left over from castration, overgrowth of the ureter or the inability to hold urine. Because it often leaked out, they lost their urine, which is why in China they like to say that someone “smells like a eunuch”.
Most eunuchs have had these problems dumped on their heads before the age of 10. Boys who were castrated at such an early age were the most valued, but many gave up their “treasure” in adulthood.
A 50-something-year-old patient told Dr Robert Coltman that he counted 22 of them when, as the married father of a one-year-old girl, he decided to look for a job at court. He took a sharp curved knife and in one clean swing cut his “treasure” himself.
Dr Coltman found it difficult to understand. For example, he operated on a 32-year-old eunuch who “castrated himself 18 months ago. This man is strong and robustly built and could earn a living doing any job that requires strength, but he deliberately castrated himself to get a cushy position as an imperial servant.”
But not all eunuchs had only a job and a livelihood in mind. Some also castrated themselves to rebel against their father. In China, they liked to say that the greatest disrespect of a child to its parents was that the child had no son, because the offspring had to look after the elderly.
One 16-year-old boy had an older brother who was castrated at an early age and worked in the palace. Knowing that his father now depended on him to provide him with offspring to care for him in his old age, the teenager took a “butcher’s knife and cut off his penis” after an argument with him.
A 22-year-old boy castrated himself with a razor because he was his father’s only son. After a quarrel, he wanted revenge on his father and robbed him of his offspring in one fell swoop.
Dr Coltman was convinced that most eunuchs castrated themselves, but there is no reliable information on this, but it is certain that many were castrated by their fathers and many by their eunuchs. Self-castration was especially prevalent in the Ming dynasty, but as the eunuchs of the time were highly corrupt, the emperors of the next dynasty, the Qing, whose reign ended with Pu Yi, decided that the population could no longer castrate themselves. If any were found to be, they could be executed.
But as the number of eunuchs rapidly declined, for the first hundred years of the Qing Dynasty the emperors kept both eyes open, and in June 1785 the then Qianlong Emperor loosened the law so that even individuals who had already been castrated could apply to work in the imperial palace. But Qianlong had something else in mind – he wanted the eunuchs to be illiterate, because then they would be less dangerous.
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The “cutters” sort it all out
Eunuchs who were born with poorly developed or non-functioning sex organs were certainly the most valued. These were the “natural eunuchs”, others had to be turned into them. In 1877, the researcher G. Carter Stent described the procedure when it was done “professionally”. Professional meant that the knife was held by a eunuch.
“The room where men or boys were made into eunuchs is just inside the inner gate of Hsi-‘hua Palace and inside the Imperial City. The building is ominous. It is known as Changtzu, the hut. It is inhabited by several men chosen by the government but not paid by it. Their duty is to castrate those who wish to become – or have been sent to become – eunuchs.
These men are called tao-tzu-chiang, or ‘cutters’. Their survival depends entirely on their eunuchs. They are paid a fixed sum of six taels for every operation on the boys they send or bring in, and for looking after the patients until they make a decent recovery. Adult men who wish to become eunuchs, but are too poor to pay the sum demanded, arrange with the “cutters” to repay them out of their wages. Nevertheless, the ‘cutters’ dare not operate on them unless they have someone to guarantee that they are trustworthy.
‘Carvers’ usually have one or two apprentices who learn the craft. These are almost always members of the ‘cutter’s’ family, so the profession could be said to be hereditary. When it is time for the operation, the candidate or the victim – depending on the circumstances – is placed on the kang in a sitting or, better, reclining position. One man supports him around the waist while the other two separate his legs and hold them firmly to prevent him from moving.
The ‘cutter’, who is operating, stands in front of the man with the knife and asks him if he will ever regret it. If the man hesitates at the last moment only to realise, the ‘cutter’ does not perform the operation, but if he continues to express his willingness, he becomes a eunuch with one swing of the ‘cutter’s’ knife.
The operation is performed as follows: white bandages or garters are tied tightly around the lower abdomen and upper thighs to prevent excessive bleeding. The parts to be operated on are washed three times with hot, scalding water while the eunuch sits prone, as described above. When the parts have been sufficiently washed, they are all cut as deeply as they can – both testicles and the penis – with a small curved knife shaped like a sickle.
Once castration is complete, a tin needle or plug is carefully inserted into the main opening at the root of the penis. The wound is then covered with paper soaked in ice water and carefully bandaged. Once the wound has been dressed, the patient must walk around the room for two or three hours, supported by two ‘ cutters’. Then he is allowed to lie down.
The patient must not drink anything for three days. During this time, he often suffers in desperate agony, not only because of thirst, but also because of intense pain and because he cannot relieve himself during this time. After three days, the bandages are removed, the plug is removed and the sufferer is relieved by a stream of urine that gushes like a well. If this happens satisfactorily, it is concluded that the patient is no longer in danger and he is congratulated. If, however, the unfortunate poor man is unable to urinate, he is condemned to die in agony because the passage has become obstructed and nothing more can save him.”
So did the “cutters” operate on everyone who wanted it? Apparently not. Parents had to register their child first, and then the eunuchs examined it. They looked at the child’s appearance, communication skills, intelligence and sexual organs. They didn’t undress him, but they did frisk him. If he was deemed suitable, he became a candidate for surgery, where the only antiseptic was fire, over which a knife was broken, and they knew of no painkillers or anything that would stop the bleeding more quickly.
Mr Carter Stent described the operation as it was before 1870. Ma Deqing was not a “cutter”, he was castrated almost 40 years later by his own father, but the procedure was still as dangerous as it had been in the past, if not more so: “After the operation, a prothorax had to be inserted into the opening that had been created, otherwise it would close up and he would not be able to urinate. He would have needed another operation … Really, the medicines that promoted the healing of the wound were just cotton pads dipped in white lard, sesame oil and crushed pepper. Changing the pads and putting them on was always extremely painful. I remember being in the warehouse all the time and my father would only let me lie on my back. Sometimes I wanted to move a little because my back was starting to hurt, but how could I? Even the slightest movement brought extreme pain out of the wound.”
Even though Dr Coltman, Mr Carter Stent and some eunuchs reported that they had had their testicles and penis removed during castration, some researchers insisted that they had certainly only been left without testicles and that the “cutters” had only undergone a procedure “akin to a piglet pluck, in which the testicles are removed or punctured. At least the operation is not lethal because there is no significant risk of bacterial infection from the incision and the person recovers within three to five days.”
But when the surviving eunuchs were examined by the doctors of the day in the 1960s, when the Cultural Revolution took place in China, they confirmed what G. Carter Stent wrote in 1877: eunuchs had neither penises nor testicles.
Fatal or acceptable desecration?
But the sexual organs of eunuchs are not the only thing that experts disagree on. Some, especially Westerners, argue that Chinese eunuchs suffered from sexual frustration and loss of sexual identity. Those who are closer to Eastern culture, on the other hand, believe that they had no problems at all with their sexual identity as a result of castration. They knew they were men before they gave up their “treasure”, and while they could not avoid some psychological changes after the procedure, they were not at all confused about their sexual identity.
Boys who became eunuchs before adolescence maintained a high voice, while those who had their genitals removed later continued to have a low voice. All were said to be mild-mannered, although on the other hand some eunuchs were excellent military leaders.
Many of them married and adopted children, or already had children when they decided to sacrifice their “treasure” to work at court. In this way, they are said to have maintained their role as men in society and had no problems doing so.
Yet the public saw them differently. For many people, their act was such self-sacrifice that they never spoke about it. In the presence of the eunuchs, they did not mention the things that broke or use the word “cut”, lest they be reminded of what they had survived and lost. If someone confessed and said something inappropriate, it was an insult to the eunuch.
Sima Qain, the so-called father of Chinese historiography, who is ranked alongside Herodotus of Greece, experienced his eunuchship as particularly traumatic. He did not choose it, but it was imposed on him as a punishment by Emperor Han Wudi for daring to defend a defeated warlord.
In 93 BC, Sima Qain wrote: “No desecration is so enormous as castration. He who has undergone such a punishment is no longer considered a man. This is not only the present attitude, it has always been so. Even an ordinary brute does not feel offended when dealing with a eunuch, let alone a gentleman with a ghost … Even after a hundred generations, my shame will be immense. It is for this reason that my entrails burn within me nine times a day, that at home I sit in a daze and lost, and outside I do not know where I am going. Whenever I think of this shame, sweat soaks my clothes on my back. I am only capable of being a slave guard in women’s rooms. It would be better for me to hide at the farthest end of the mountains.” Nevertheless, he has managed to complete the very voluminous history of China that his father had begun to write and which is now entitled Shiji.
No more eunuchs
But those were very different times from the early 20th century in which Sun Yaoting lived. After Pu Yi’s resignation, he was able to work in the palace because, under an agreement with the new government, the imperial family was allowed to continue living there. They received an annual allowance of 4 million dollars and were allowed to keep all their movable assets. This was one of the main reasons why the eunuch system fell apart.
Most of the imperial treasures, ranging from numerous antiquities to art paintings, ceramics and pottery, were stored in Jianfu Palace. Pu Yi once visited it. He could not believe how small his dynasty’s collection was. How many imperial valuables had actually slipped through his hands over the years, he wondered. How many more valuables did he have? What should he do with them and how could he prevent them from being stolen from him?
Reports of thefts were regular since 1912, but by the early 1920s, so many of the Emperor’s artworks had landed on the international art market that they had become notorious. Pu Yi decided to take control of his court and inventory all the valuables that remained in Jianfu Palace. “On the evening of the twenty-seventh of June 1923, the same day I started the project, a fire broke out and everything disappeared, whether inventoried or not,” he later wrote.
Pu Yi immediately suspected that the Jianfu Palace had caught fire because of the monks. “After the fire, many eunuchs were questioned and that’s when Pu Yi found out about their past thefts. The firefighters said that their members smelled petrol when they got there. When Pu Yi found this out, he became even more convinced that the fire was set by the eunuchs to cover up what they had stolen,” his cousin reported.
Twenty days after the fire, on 16 July 1923, Pu Yi abolished the eunuch system, even though those close to him strongly opposed it. Finally, he asked them, “If the palace burns down again, which of you is willing to take responsibility for it?”
His cousin reported it this way, but Pu Yi spoke a little differently. He knew about the thefts, he wrote, but he was more concerned about his own life than his property. Not long after the fire broke out in Jianfu Palace, flames also rose outside his sleeping quarters. He behaved appallingly towards the eunuchs. Are they trying to take revenge on him?
He preferred to disband them, although his decision was also influenced by his Scottish teacher Reginald Johnston, who informed him in 1923 that the eunuchs were smuggling imperial treasures out of the palace and selling them to antique shops.
But Sun Yaoting was not one of those who got rich by stealing, although he was supposedly very bright, but he had to be in Pu Yi’s court to survive. After 1924 he moved to the Temple of the Eunuchs, and in 1932 he was given another chance to fulfil his dream. Pu Yi became puppet emperor of the Japanese colony of Manchukuo in Manchuria, taking with him some 12 eunuchs, although he no longer formally employed them.
But Manchukuo did not last long either. After the end of World War II, the Soviet forces returned it to China and Sun Yaoting was once again without a future. He returned to Beijing and tried to survive in the Temple of the Eunuchs until the state came to their rescue in 1949. “The government came to the temple and saw how poor we were. They gave us clothes and food. Those who could work were given jobs.”
In the 1960s, when the Cultural Revolution began, eunuchism almost cost him his head. But the danger was not only to him, but also to his relatives. His brothers, not wanting anyone to associate them with him, threw Sun’s precious treasure, which they guarded and which assured him that he would be born a “whole” man in the second generation, into the garbage.
When he found out, the 60-year-old Sun cried for the second time in his life. The first time tears came to his eyes was because of the pain of becoming a eunuch. He lived to be almost 95. He adopted a child and had grandchildren. Until his death, he supported himself by taking care of a Buddhist temple.
In September 2012, a study was published in which researchers found that men without testicles live longer. They looked closely at eunuchs from the Korean court during the Chosun Dynasty (1392-1910) and found that they lived an average of 70 years, or 14 to 19 years longer than men with testicles who lived similar lives to them.
But their longer lives could also be linked to better living conditions at court. No, say the researchers, with a few exceptions, most did not live in the palace and were only there when they were working. By contrast, the life expectancy of kings who spent their entire lives in the palace was 47 years.
Scientists have also found that castration extends the lifespan of animals, but how it would affect the longevity of a modern male will never be known, at least empirically.
