Monday, April 13, 2009

Hermaphrodites were called the "eunuch" in China...



As long ago as the 8th Century B.C., Chinese emperors kept castrated males as palace servants, especially to guard harems. This tradition officially ended with the end of the Ch'ing dynasty in the republican revolution of 1912. There were said to be 470 eunuchs in China at that time.

Well, I disagree with the statement that this tradition officially ended with the end of the Ch'ing dynasty. To shy away from the term, "eunuch", the hermaphrodites in China are hiding under an undisclosed name.
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Only two memories brought tears to Sun Yaoting's eyes in old age -- the day his father cut off his genitals, and the day his family threw away the pickled remains that should have made him a whole man again at death.

China's last eunuch was tormented and impoverished in youth, punished in revolutionary China for his role as the "Emperor's slave" but finally feted and valued, largely for outlasting his peers to become a unique relic, a piece of "living history."

He had stories of the tortuous rituals of the Forbidden City, Emperor Pu Yi's last moments there and the troubled puppet court run by the Japanese during the 1930s. He escaped back to the heart of a civil war, became a Communist official and then a target of radical leftists before being finally left in peace.

This turbulent life has been recorded in the "The Last Eunuch of China" by amateur historian Jia Yinghua, who over years of friendship drew out of Sun the secrets that were too painful or intimate to spill to prying journalists or state archivists.

He died in 1996, in an old temple that had become his home, and his biography was finally published in English this year.

It unveils formerly taboo subjects like the sex life of eunuchs and the emperor they served, the agonizing castrations often done at home and also often lethal, and the incontinence and shame that came with the promise of great power........

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