The LA Times has an interesting piece up about Sun Yaoting, the last eunuch to the last Chinese emperor.

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.

Pretty gruesome eh? Not only did Sun endure a lifetime of incontinence and sexual frustration but in fear of punishment during the Cultural Revolution his family disposed of his pickled ‘three precious’ denying him the right to return to earth as a ‘complete man’. Despite the imperial overthrow Sun earned a place in Chinese history by becoming the last eunuch to the puppet monarch Puyi, before his death in 1966.

Living his later life tending to Beijing’s temples with his adopted son and grandson he eventually died in 1996. Jia Yinghua’s biography of Sun (The Last Eunuch of China: The Life of Sun Yaoting) has recently been translated into English, based on over one hundred hours of conversations and apparently 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’. Grim, but I’m sure very interesting nevertheless

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