The Way of the Three Treasures: A History of the Eunuch

The second time Sun Yaoting lost his three most precious treasures, it was forever. Until his dying day, his heart ached for their destruction at the hands of family members seized by the terror of the Red Guards.

Since the dawn of what we call civilization, humans have gone to great lengths to incorporate the castration of their fellows into the human experience. The service of eunuchs was a staple of the royal courts of the Fertile Crescent and the Nile Delta, likely predating the first records etched into damp clay, papyrus, or stone.

These noble institutions proved so hospitable to the ruling classes that they remained an integral part of the palace and estate structures throughout Hellenistic cultures and the Islamic world.

Eunuchs served the emirs of the Arab Caliphate and the princely courts of the eastern Iranian world, from Mamluk Cairo and Delhi to the magnificence of Cordoba. The Ottomans refined the institution further, distinguishing between "white" and "black" eunuchs. The former were mostly drawn from the Christian populations of the Caucasus and the Balkans and castrated "at the palace," while the latter arrived at the empire's borders as a finished product. Snatched from forgotten homes in Ethiopia and Sudan, they were sent to the bloody castration and trade centers on the Red Sea coast, the Eritrean interior, and the Coptic monasteries of Upper Egypt. Research suggests that only a tenth of the victims of the African trade survived the horrific surgery.

Despite the trail of the fallen and the hollowed that stretched from Andalusia to Delhi, nowhere did this noble institution achieve the scale, influence, and historical complexity that eunuchism attained in late Imperial China.

Castration has a long history in China. Originally an unbearable punishment for enemies of the crown, foreign captives, and criminals, it evolved as the dynastic cycles turned. Over generations, eunuchs were woven into the very fabric of the Chinese elite. Beyond the harem duties common to emasculated men everywhere, they began to occupy increasingly substantial administrative roles.

In earlier periods, most eunuchs in the Chinese court were outsiders—prisoners of war, defeated rebels, or tribute from foreign missions. Over time, however, and especially during the Ming Dynasty, Han Chinese eunuchs became a common phenomenon. The Forbidden City grew ever more reliant on them for a vast array of maintenance, service, and clerical roles.

So essential were they to the court's existence that a special clinic was established south of the Forbidden City to "produce" eunuchs from among the empire's males who volunteered for the agonizing procedure. In Chinese tradition, the process involved the removal of both the penis and the testicles—the "Three Treasures." These were severed with a single stroke of a knife after the candidate was restrained in a special chair and the organs washed with hot pepper water. Once the surgery was complete, a bamboo drainage tube was inserted into the urethra, and the "upgraded" male was ordered to waddle for three hours and abstain from drinking for three days. If, after three days of agony, the new eunuch managed to urinate, the surgery was declared a success, followed by a hundred days of recovery. The severed organs were often preserved in a bottle or pouch with a preservative, kept by their former owner in his sash until the day he would be reunited with them in the afterlife.

In classical Chinese culture—which prized learning and viewed the body as a priceless gift from ancestors—one can understand why finding a shortcut to state service through self-mutilation caused such intense revulsion. The bitter rivalry between the eunuch factions and the scholar-officials, or "mandarins," is a recurring theme in Chinese political and literary history.

Eunuchs were often depicted as corrupt, gluttonous creatures, reaching their pale fingers into government departments to defile them, while whispering venom into the ears of concubines, heirs, and the Emperor himself. Particularly notorious was the "Eastern Depot," the secret eunuch police force that interrogated and tortured the Emperor's enemies—and anyone else they saw fit to target.

While there was a measure of truth to this image, the reality was more nuanced. The relationship between the educated bureaucracy and the eunuchs was varied; the imperial administration included educated, upright eunuchs and corrupt officials alike. The interactions between these court elements often included genuine trust and steadfast friendship.

And yet, the Ming eunuch institution—perhaps like any human institution that persists too long—eventually grew stale with corruption and cruelty. Toward the end of the dynasty, thousands were in service, while imperial decrees tried in vain to stop the wave of self-castration by subjects desperate for a foothold in the Forbidden City. Lacking the physical strength for agricultural labor, many of these dispossessed men formed predatory gangs in rural areas, further destabilizing the state of affairs "Under Heaven."

With the fall of the Ming and the rise of the Qing, the number of eunuchs decreased significantly. However, as a sort of "guild of experts" in palace management, they remained a significant factor until the dynasty fell in 1911. Sun Yaoting was a young man when his family forced him to undergo the surgery; he served in the Forbidden City for only a few months before the monarchy was abolished.

Like many of his kind—drifting shadows of a vanished era—Yaoting barely survived the upheavals of 20th-century China. His fellow castrati were denounced as sickly remnants of a rotting age; some chose to leap to their deaths at the bottom of the Forbidden City's moat.

After leaving the palace, Yaoting adopted a child and raised him as a son, finding modest work as a caretaker in a Beijing temple until his death in 1996. During Mao's Red Terror, Yaoting's relatives, fearing the Red Guards, destroyed his bottled organs—the last remnant of his lost masculinity and the dynasty in whose name he had surrendered it to an ancient knife.

In the pictures:

A wise eunuch: Varys.

An innocent eunuch: Sun Yaoting, one of the last eunuchs in Chinese history (d. 1996).

A wicked eunuch: Wei Zhongxian. Master of the "Eastern Depot," one of the most notorious eunuchs in Chinese history.

A eunuch who didn't know when to be quiet: Sima Qian, the father of Chinese history, Han Dynasty. Castrated as punishment following court intrigues and the Xiongnu wars.

Also:

• "Court Management Guild" – Qing eunuchs.
• Zheng He: A Muslim descendant of a Central Asian family who rose to greatness as a eunuch in the service of the Ming Dynasty and became known as the Admiral of the "Treasure Fleet." He brought a giraffe home.
• Castration blade, China, 18th-19th century(?).
• Kizlar Agha. The "Black" Harem eunuch, head of the Ottoman Empire (may his soul be bound in the bundle of life). Period of Abdul Hamid II.
• Castration in the Islamic world. From a medical book by Sharaf al-Din (1466).