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.
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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 was unconscious for three days and could barely move for two months. A goose quill was inserted in Sun’s urethra to prevent it getting blocked as the wound healed. 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. 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. They effectively swapped their reproductive organs for a hope of exclusive access to the emperor that made some into rich and influential politicians. 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.įor centuries in China, the only men from outside the imperial family who were allowed into the Forbidden City’s private quarters were castrated ones. 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 died in 1996, in an old temple that had become his home, and his biography was finally published in English this year. 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 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. 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. REUTERS/HandoutĬhina’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.” Jia Yinghua (L), the author of "The Last Eunuch of China", poses with China's last eunuch, Sun Yaoting, at Sun's house in Beijing in a 1996 photo.
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