The Last Eunuch Bizarre Chapter In Chinese History At An End

Over the centuries, the most secretive and grotesque corner of China’s extensive imperial court belonged to the fraternity of special guardians: the eunuchs whose high voices and soft demeanors often cloaked the viciousness of their back-alley politicking and custody of the Forbidden City’s magnificent exotica.

When the last emperor’s last eunuch died this week, he closed the final page on a bizarre chapter of Chinese imperial history, even though the last dynasty and its ancient system of governing were overthrown in 1911.

The eunuch, Sun Yaoting, was just days shy of 94 years old when he died at his home in a Beijing temple Tuesday evening.

Like the thousands who preceded him through Chinese history, Sun was emasculated as a young boy, in a crude and risky operation that was arranged by his family, who were looking for a way out of poverty and into the private domain of China’s highest rulers.

Aside from the emperor, eunuchs were generally the only men trusted to enter the inner courtyards of the palace, where the women of the imperial family and harem lived. Other men, including officials, military guards and even the emperor’s male relatives, were often required to leave the palace grounds at night.

Using only hot chili sauce as a local anesthetic, the people who performed this fateful operation typically did so in one swoop, using a small, curved knife.

In exchange for a lifetime of humiliation marked by incontinence and sexual frustration, a few eunuchs were able to achieve tremendous influence and wealth.

Only months after Sun’s family forced him through this ordeal in 1911, the Manchu Dynasty, which had ruled China since the early 1600s, was overthrown, bringing an end to this system.

Yet Sun continued to serve Pu Yi, the puppet monarch depicted in the film “The Last Emperor,” during ensuing decade, when the former ruler was allowed to continue to live in the Forbidden City, occasionally playing tennis in its spacious courtyards.

Sun’s biographer, Jia Yinghua, said that the last eunuch was memorialized in a traditional ceremony at the Guanghua Temple in Beijing, where his family laid a gold cloth across his face, put rings on his fingers and shrouded him in white silk embroidered with the dragon and phoenix emblems of China’s imperial tradition.

“He was a man of rare intelligence,” Jia told Reuters, recounting how Sun had revisited the Forbidden City in 1993 for the first time in more than 70 years and had pointed out inaccuracies in the historical displays.

In one corner of the outer square of the palace, a granite block still marks the spot where some of Sun’s fellow eunuchs were said to have lost their “three precious,” as the organs were called in court parlance of the day.

Traditionally, a eunuch preserved his genitals in a jar, to insure that they would eventually be buried with him, in the belief that this would guarantee his reincarnation as a “full” man.

Yet Sun was not so fortunate. During the Cultural Revolution, a decade of intense political and social upheaval that began in 1966 - coincidentally the year that former Emperor Pu Yi died - Sun’s family destroyed his jar. They were afraid of being punished by marauding Red Guards if such a symbol of China’s feudal past were discovered.

Sun passed his later years tending Beijing’s temples, and Jia said the eunuch’s adopted son and grandson would now take his remains to a home village, near the northern city of Tianjin, for further ceremonies before having them cremated in Beijing.

The practice of using castrated men as guardians of the emperor’s inner court began more than 2,000 years ago.

“Since the emperor would not come out from the inner recesses of the Forbidden City - an area closed to all save the imperial family and their personal attendants,” wrote Jonathan D. Spence, a China historian at Yale University, in his book “The Search for Modern China, “the eunuchs became crucial intermediaries between the outer bureaucratic world and the inner imperial one.

A generation before Sun was born, Li Lianying accumulated vast influence as the favorite eunuch of the Empress Dowager Cixi, one of the greatest purveyors of imperial politics. She climbed from a concubine third-grade to become ruler of China for 40 years in the 19th century, and relentlessly played off her courtiers against one another.

Li headed an imperial staff of thousands of cooks, gardeners, laundrymen, cleaners, painters and other eunuchs, who were classified in a complex hierarchy of 48 separate grades.

Jia, the biographer, said China’s last eunuch had never stopped lamenting the fall of the imperial system he had aspired to serve.

“That was the regret of his whole life,” Jia said.