“It was very painful. It was done without anaesthetic and proper medical instruments.” These were the words in 1982 of a Chinese eunuch remembering the day, 70 years before, when his own father took a razor to his son’s genitals. Sun Yaoting was the last surviving eunuch from the court of the imperial Qing dynasty, which ruled China for 300 years.
The Qing emperors retained hundreds of eunuchs to perform a range of tasks. These subordinate males endured castration at a young age, at the hands of their own family, in order to advance up the social ladder. Having been emasculated, they were then taken to the imperial court where their parents would beg the imperial officials to hire their mutilated child as a servant.
Last imperial Chinese eunuch
Sun Yaoting came from a lowly peasant background. But having lost his genitals, he was able to apply for work within the vermillion walls of the imperial palace in Tiananmen Square, Beijing. Aged ten, he was ordered to serve the teenage Empress Wanrong. This involved serving her meals and removing her excrement pots every day.
Countless thousands of eunuchs had served the Chinese emperors and when Sun Yaoting joined the court around the year 1912, there were still a thousand eunuchs on the imperial payroll. However, in that year, the Chinese empire was overthrown in a coup and became a republic. But the emperor and empress were allowed to continue living in the palace, the Forbidden City, almost as if nothing had happened.
Life for the eunuchs continued with harsh discipline, including beatings, normally enforced by older eunuchs. Sun Yaoting, and hundreds of others like him, went on serving Emperor Puyi and Empress Wanrong much as they had done for centuries. On occasion he was even invited to eat with the empress though he had to ‘kowtow’ before her three times, and then have his dinner standing up.
Then in 1924, the Chinese authorities expelled the royal dynasty from its palace, ordering them to become regular citizens with no titles. The emperor, and many of his servants, fled to Japanese controlled Tianjin. Until the end of the Second World War, in 1945, Puyi ruled as a puppet of Tokyo on Chinese soil. After the war, he was punished by newly liberated China and spent many years in prison before dying in 1967.
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After 1924, Sun Yaoting continued to live in modest lodgings behind the Forbidden City. Around him were many other unemployed eunuchs, some of whom took to begging on the streets. That was not a life he wanted to lead. So together with thirty other eunuchs, Sun Yaoting took up residence in the Xing Long Temple. When Chairman Mao’s Communists took over China in 1949, the temple became state property and the surviving eunuchs were paid pensions.
During the Maoist Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, there was a violent purge of all remnants of China’s imperial past. During this turbulent period, Sun Yaoting’s family destroyed his genitals, which had been retained in a box. This was an old practice. Fearing they might be discovered by hotheaded revolutionaries, they were discarded. Having remained silent about this life, Sun Yaoting went public in 1982 as China emerged from full-blown Maoism. He enjoyed the media focus on his life story ahead of his death in 1996.
