Sun Yaoting, China's last eunuch

Imagine for a moment giving up your most precious possession in the hope that it will bring you something more. Imagine it's something irreparable and irreplaceable. How would you feel if, after giving up your treasure, you learn that you've given it up for nothing?

That, in a nutshell, is the story of Sun Yaoting, China's last eunuch. At the age of six, he saw the homecoming of Xiaode Zhang, chief eunuch at the Imperial Palace. Having come from a peasant background like Zhang's, Sun was amazed at the wealth and respect he commanded upon his return. He, too, he decided, would become a eunuch, serve the Emperor and rescue his family from the cycle of poverty and injustice that has defined their lives.

When he was eight, his father performed the castration, cutting off Sun's genitals with a sharp razor in their home. The pain was such that Sun was in a coma for three days and had to stay in bed for the next two months, barely able to move.

Just as he was recovering, news from Beijing finally reached their little village. Emperor Pu Yi had abdicated. Pu Yi gave up the throne around the same time that Sun gave up his manhood to serve him.

Sun Yaoting’s life was full of incidents like this – near-misses, wrong timings, and almost-made-it moments. This explains the sadness underlying The Last Eunuch of China: The Life of Sun Yaoting, a biography written by Sun’s confidante Jia Yinghai.

Eunuchs occupied a special, if not totally comfortable, place in Chinese imperial history. Only men who had been castrated were allowed inside the inner sanctum of the Forbidden City. Because of their proximity to the Imperial family, they were privy to secrets and wielded a subtle influence that was sought after.

They also lived and died on the whim of the people they served. For breaking the smallest rule of protocol, they were badly beaten and sometimes even put to death. This was the world that Sun Yaoting soon found himself in, after he entered into the service of the Emperor's uncle in Beijing.

Sun Yaoting (L) with the abbot of Beijing's Guanghua Temple. (Image: China.org.cn)Sun would need every ounce of intelligence and cunning to survive in the tumultuous world that was China in the first half of the twentieth century. He was a man caught between the cloistered world of the Imperial family and the outside world that regarded him as a curiosity at best and a freak at worst.

In China, after all, a son is invested with many responsibilities. Foremost among them was providing sons who could perform sacrifices to ancestors. One of the often repeated phrases in the book is the old Chinese saying, “Of the three unfilial things to do, the worst is to have no son.”

Sun Yaoting's life is a valuable account of life within the walls of the Forbidden City. It also provides an interesting insight into a country in transition, covering as it does historical events spanning the fall of the Qing dynasty to the Cultural Revolution.

At times, the accounts are shocking because of the straightforward simplicity that was used to recount them. Tales of conniving, treachery, abuse, sexual improprieties and murder are amplified because they are recalled with almost clinical detachment. The narrative itself is sometimes disjointed and jarring, which only emphasizes the broken world that eunuchs inhabited.