The Last Eunuch of China: The Life of Sun Yaoting

Posted June 5, 2009

If Sun Yaoting’s story was on offer today it would have the editors of British “red top” tabloids and American supermarket-checkout scandal magazines reaching for their check books and then adding a zero or two to any bid in order to ensure exclusive rights. “Palace insider reveals royal perversions!” the headlines might scream, introducing a series of lurid exposés of the late eunuch’s mutilation at the hands of his father, and his periods of service for assorted members of the Qing imperial family, including the neglected last empress Wan Rong.

Born in 1902, Sun lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history, from the downfall of the Great Qing Empire, through the establishment of the Republic of China, the Japanese occupation and civil war, to the founding of the People’s Republic and the series of nightmarish political campaigns that followed. So reasonably there ought to be every expectation of a poignant, event-filled narrative and new information on key incidents in the ex-emperor’s final years at the Forbidden City, spiced with titillating through-the-keyhole views of imperial foibles.

But no. Unfortunately, this book was published in mainland China, where writing biography must be one of the planet’s least intellectually satisfying occupations. Any account of the period in question must conform both with the approved historical line and the straight-laced values of state censorship, thus invariably ending up emasculated itself.

The prose is leaden yet plump with cliché, and the English translation ridden with grammatical errors, anachronisms and the odd malapropism. Jia Yinghua is vice president of the Chinese Society of Biographers, a position not gained through critical thinking or deviation from the Party line, and the narrative is presented without critical analysis and apparently without even much in the way of simple fact-checking.

In China, biography is most commonly undertaken to whitewash over shades of grey, so it comes as no surprise that Sun is presented as a shiningly honest member of a caste otherwise widely loathed for its corruption. This is despite having chosen to lose his manhood (at least according to Mr. Jia) in order to emulate a notoriously wealthy and powerful eunuch from a nearby village.

While many admired rich eunuchs, no one would have assumed their gains were other than ill-gotten, and indeed some of the more entertaining parts of an otherwise largely lackluster narrative are those describing the myriad ways in which the eunuchs raid the imperial coffers. The book itself reveals that while Sun proves honest enough to hand over to the empress ingots he carried away during the hasty eviction of the imperial family from the Forbidden City in 1924, he wasn’t honest enough to admit to her that he knew who had run off with the rest.

The story opens with tragicomedy, as well as the first hint that we’re not going to hear the whole truth. Sun’s gelding, which in Chinese tradition required the removal not only of testicles but penis too, is performed by his father a month after the 1912 abdication of the last emperor. Although their home village is just outside Tianjin, even then less than a day’s travel from the capital, it is only a month later, while the mutilated child is still healing, that the news arrives. The family concludes it has risked the boy’s life for nothing.

Mr. Jia is keen to stress at both the beginning and the end of the book that his child hero demanded the operation so that he might become rich and avenge assorted humiliations suffered by his impoverished father. But in an interview given to the Reuters news agency in 1985, Sun made clear it was his father’s decision to prepare one of his four sons for potential riches in imperial service, and he who chose Sun to go under the knife. Rather than a decisive expression of filial piety, the boy may simply have been the least valued of the Sun sons.

The same interview correctly gives Mr. Sun’s age as 10 at the time, whereas Mr. Jia, despite correctly providing Sun’s date of birth and that of the abdication, manages to assert at the end of the book that the castration took place when Sun was eight. This is not the book’s only inconsistency.

Through a mixture of good fortune and connections, the teenage Sun eventually obtains a position first at the mansion of the emperor’s uncle, and then a succession of posts within the Forbidden City itself. He narrowly survives the mass expulsion of eunuchs in 1923 (Mr. Jia sometimes gives this as 1921) when the emperor, outraged at the eunuchs’ cunning cupidity reduces their numbers from around 1,200 to a few dozen. Only briefly banished, he ends up waiting on the Empress Wan Rong.

Mr. Jia fails in any way to analyze the value or veracity of Sun’s recollections, or to make any distinction between the eunuch’s own experiences, those of other eunuchs whose stories he passes on or even those that other eunuchs themselves report hearing from yet further eunuchs.

Perhaps the greatest interest in the book lies not in the glimpses of great men, but in an account of eunuch life after imperial service, when those who had not managed to amass funds became the largely indigent residents of temples their more successful predecessors had founded and funded. The Japanese occupation and the sensitive disasters of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution get little more than walk-on parts, although Sun narrowly escapes a beating at the hands of Red Guards, loses his remaining savings and finds himself forcibly returned to his home village. The villagers eventually ask him if he wouldn’t mind going back to Beijing, since there’s a shortage of food in the countryside.

Sun died in 1996 shortly before his 94th birthday, having given extensive interviews to Mr. Jia and seen the publication of the Chinese original of this new translation. At the very least Mr. Jia has ensured that Sun and his kind will not soon be forgotten. That, perhaps, would be the unkindest cut of all.

Peter Neville-Hadley is the author of several guides to China, including a forthcoming new volume on Beijing.