The Biography of Sun Yaoting, China's Last Surviving Eunuch, is finally published this year, in English.Secret Sex Lives Of Eunuchs & The King
In it, Sun reveals the previously taboo subjects, such as the sex life of eunuchs, and the sexuality of the King they served.
The King's Homosexuality
Sun had told his biographer that PuYi, the puppet emperor of the then Japanese Occupied China,"was less interested in his wife than in a particular eunuch who "looked like a pretty girl with his tall, slim figure, handsome face and creamy white skin." He recalled that the two were "inseparable as body and shadow."
Castrated at 8 without anesthesia
Sun led a tumultuous life. Hoping to serve the Emperor for a better life, he was castrated at 8 without anesthesia.
"His desperate father performed the castration on the bed of their mud-walled home, with no anaesthetic and only oil-soaked paper as a bandage. A goose quill was inserted in Sun's urethra to prevent it getting blocked as the wound healed."
"He was unconscious for three days and could barely move for two months."
They Don't Need Eunuchs Anymore
"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."
They no longer need eunuchs.
Brief Service
"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"
Family Discarded His Preserved Manhood
"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."
Worked As A Temple Caretaker Till His Death
During this time, "many of the eunuchs became penniless outcasts. A few drowned themselves in the moats of the Forbidden City.
Sun, one of the few who was literate, got a job as caretaker of a temple, where he lived until his death(1996).
The recollections of an adopted son and a grandson, together with the biography, make him one of the most documented eunuchs of modern times."
"He never became rich, he never became powerful, but he became very rich in experience and secrets".
Sources : AsiaOne, LA Times
It's hard not to feel a tinge of sadness after reading about his life.
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