Biography of last Chinese eunuch reveals a tumultuous life

BEIJING — Sun Yaoting was 8 when his father castrated him with a single swoop of a razor.

The year was 1911, and China was in turmoil. Just a few months later rebels deposed the emperor, overturned centuries of tradition and established a republic.

"Our boy has suffered for nothing," his father said, weeping and beating his breast, when he learned that the emperor had been overthrown. "They don't need eunuchs anymore!"

Little did he know that the child nevertheless would earn a place in Chinese history. The imperial court was resuscitated long enough to give Sun a chance to serve the wife of the boy emperor Puyi -- a position that gave him the distinction of being the last eunuch to the last Chinese emperor.

After the Communists came to power in 1949, Sun and other surviving eunuchs were despised as freakish symbols of the feudal past. He was nearly killed during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, and his siblings were so fearful of persecution that they threw away his bao, or treasure: the severed genitals that eunuchs kept pickled in a jar so they could be buried as complete men.

It was not until the final years of his life that Sun was recognized as a rare living repository of history. A biography based on hours of interviews in the years before his death in 1996 was recently translated into English. The book arrives as a museum dedicated to eunuchs, built around the tomb of a 16th century eunuch, is undergoing a major expansion. It is scheduled to reopen in May.

Whether the interest is prurient or scholarly, the curiosity is definitely there.

Emasculation was thought to render eunuchs nonpersons, without ambition or ego, so their presence in the innermost sanctum of the imperial palace did not violate the emperor's privacy.

"The eunuchs were very mysterious and in some ways more interesting than the emperors themselves," said Jia Yinghua, Sun's biographer. Jia met Sun when he was researching a book about Puyi, and recorded 100 hours of conversations with him.

The biography, "The Last Eunuch of China: The Life of Sun Yaoting," contains everything you might want to know about the gruesome particulars of becoming a eunuch, along with much you probably would not want to know.

Suffice it to say the boys went through excruciating pain without benefit of anesthesia (other than chile peppers in some cases). In addition to a lifetime of impotence, they often suffered incontinence in exchange for entry to the palace.