He was just eight years of age when he took
the decision that was to transform his life.
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| Sun Yaoting in 1996: no turning back |
Sun Yaoting had been chatting with an
elderly eunuch who had become rich from serving the Chinese emperor.
Now, the autumn of 1911, Sun decided to
follow the same path. He asked his father to castrate him in order that he
could serve Emperor Puyi - known to history as the ‘Last Emperor’.
It was a momentous decision. Unlike many eunuchs
in the Ottoman Empire, Chinese eunuchs had every bit of their genitals removed.
It was an operation that caused not only excruciating pain, but led to a
lifetime of sexual frustration, impotence and incontinence.
Sun remained undaunted. On the appointed
day, he removed his clothes and lay completely still while his father bound up
his hands and feet with a rope. Then, with a single violent swoop of a razor,
his father performed the operation.
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| Emperor Puyi in 1922 |
In a matter of seconds - and a torrent of
blood - Sun had become a eunuch. He was bandaged with oiled cloth to staunch
the bleeding. Ground chilli seeds were sprinkled on the wound.
The young lad lay in a coma for three days.
For eight weeks he was virtually paralysed. And for many more months, he could
not walk because of the excruciating pain. But he eventually recovered from the
loss of blood and looked forwards to joining the emperor’s royal household in
the Forbidden City.
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| Sun's fellow eunuchs |
Emperor Puyi had more than 1,000 eunuchs,
many of whom wielded positions of great influence. The emperor rarely left the
inner recesses of the palace, meaning that the eunuchs became crucial
intermediaries between the outer bureaucratic world and the inner Imperial one.
Puyi himself would later write of these
‘slaves’, who attended him day and night.
‘They waited on me when I ate, dressed and
slept. They accompanied me on my walks and to my lessons; they told me stories
and had rewards and beatings from me, but they never left my presence. They
were my slaves and they were my earliest teachers.’
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| Puyi's wife: he preferred eunuchs |
This was the role to which Sun now aspired:
he wanted to get the ear of the emperor in order that he might acquire power
and influence.
But scarcely had he recovered from his operation than he received news that was to shock
him to the core: the emperor had abdicated. The Imperial court was being
disbanded and Sun’s castration had been in vain.
But the dynasty did not die immediately and
Sun was not left entirely without hope. He first found employment with one of
the emperor’s uncles, and later he worked for the wife of Emperor Puyi.
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| The Forbidden City |
For the decades that followed, he was to
serve the former imperial family with devotion. He accompanied them to
Manchuria, where Puyi was installed as the puppet emperor of the Japanese
colonial state of Manchukuo in 1932.
He was also witness to all the innermost
secrets of the imperial household: the emperor’s refusal to sleep with his wife
on their wedding night and Puyi’s obsession with a fellow eunuch, ‘who looked
like a pretty girl with his tall, slim figure, handsome face and creamy white
skin.’
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| Emperor Puyi of Manchukuo |
Sun was luckier than the majority of the
emperor’s eunuchs, who had been abandoned by the court and left penniless. Some
became outcasts in society. Many more committed suicide. Others sought
sanctuary in the temples of Beijing.
Sun’s own life took a downward turn in
1949, when the Communists came to power. Gone were the days when eunuchs were
viewed with fear and admiration. Now they were despised as outmoded relics of
China’s feudal past.
Sun lost his most treasured possession - his severed pickled genitals - during the Cultural Revolution. Eunuchs always
kept them in a jar, in order that they could be buried together with their corpse. It was
believed that such a practice would guarantee their reincarnation as ‘whole’
men.
But Sun’s genitals were thrown away like
common garbage, causing him to weep openly.
Sun was to live another three decades,
dying in 1996 at the age of 94. He never recovered from the loss of his pickled
‘treasure’.
‘When I die,’ he said sadly, ‘I will come
back as a cat or a dog.’
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UK paperback
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NOW PUBLISHED IN PAPERBACK
And for my American readers, it is now published under the title: The Boy Who Went to War: The Story of a Reluctant German Soldier in WWII available here
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Newly published US edition
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'Idiosyncratic and utterly fascinating... an extraordinary tale of hardship, horror and amazing good fortune' James Delingpole, The Daily Mail
Chinese eunuchs differed from eunuchs in other parts of the world. Usually the testicles were removed but in China everything is cut off, and the area is left totally smooth. A straw was inserted in the urethra until it heals and there is a hole for urination. There was a constant flow of urine and absorbent pads were usually worn. 19th century visitors to China always wrote of the stench of urine in the palaces and visitors carried perfumed hankies. A eunuch in Turkey or Russia could and did have sexual relations whereas in China they were celibate by design.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this: I must say, it makes one wince. I'd read about the stench of urine in the imperial palaces. Not nice! Giles
ReplyDelete