He was just eight years of age when he tookthe decision that was to transform his life.
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| Sun Yaoting in 1996: no turning back |
Sun Yaoting had been chatting with anelderly eunuch who had become rich from serving the Chinese emperor.
Now, the autumn of 1911, Sun decided tofollow the same path. He asked his father to castrate him in order that hecould serve Emperor Puyi - known to history as the ‘Last Emperor’.
It was a momentous decision. Unlike many eunuchsin the Ottoman Empire, Chinese eunuchs had every bit of their genitals removed.It was an operation that caused not only excruciating pain, but led to alifetime of sexual frustration, impotence and incontinence.
Sun remained undaunted. On the appointedday, he removed his clothes and lay completely still while his father bound uphis hands and feet with a rope. Then, with a single violent swoop of a razor,his father performed the operation.
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| Emperor Puyi in 1922 |
In a matter of seconds - and a torrent ofblood - Sun had become a eunuch. He was bandaged with oiled cloth to staunchthe bleeding. Ground chilli seeds were sprinkled on the wound.
The young lad lay in a coma for three days.For eight weeks he was virtually paralysed. And for many more months, he couldnot walk because of the excruciating pain. But he eventually recovered from theloss of blood and looked forwards to joining the emperor’s royal household inthe Forbidden City.
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| Sun's fellow eunuchs |
Emperor Puyi had more than 1,000 eunuchs,many of whom wielded positions of great influence. The emperor rarely left theinner recesses of the palace, meaning that the eunuchs became crucialintermediaries between the outer bureaucratic world and the inner Imperial one.
Puyi himself would later write of these‘slaves’, who attended him day and night.
‘They waited on me when I ate, dressed andslept. They accompanied me on my walks and to my lessons; they told me storiesand had rewards and beatings from me, but they never left my presence. Theywere my slaves and they were my earliest teachers.’
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| Puyi's wife: he preferred eunuchs |
This was the role to which Sun now aspired:he wanted to get the ear of the emperor in order that he might acquire powerand influence.
But scarcely had he recovered from his operation than he received news that was to shockhim to the core: the emperor had abdicated. The Imperial court was beingdisbanded and Sun’s castration had been in vain.
But the dynasty did not die immediately andSun was not left entirely without hope. He first found employment with one ofthe emperor’s uncles, and later he worked for the wife of Emperor Puyi.
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| The Forbidden City |
For the decades that followed, he was toserve the former imperial family with devotion. He accompanied them toManchuria, where Puyi was installed as the puppet emperor of the Japanesecolonial state of Manchukuo in 1932.
He was also witness to all the innermostsecrets of the imperial household: the emperor’s refusal to sleep with his wifeon their wedding night and Puyi’s obsession with a fellow eunuch, ‘who lookedlike a pretty girl with his tall, slim figure, handsome face and creamy whiteskin.’
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| Emperor Puyi of Manchukuo |
Sun was luckier than the majority of theemperor’s eunuchs, who had been abandoned by the court and left penniless. Somebecame outcasts in society. Many more committed suicide. Others soughtsanctuary in the temples of Beijing.
Sun’s own life took a downward turn in1949, when the Communists came to power. Gone were the days when eunuchs wereviewed with fear and admiration. Now they were despised as outmoded relics ofChina’s feudal past.
Sun lost his most treasured possession - his severed pickled genitals - during the Cultural Revolution. Eunuchs alwayskept them in a jar, in order that they could be buried together with their corpse. It wasbelieved that such a practice would guarantee their reincarnation as ‘whole’men.
But Sun’s genitals were thrown away likecommon garbage, causing him to weep openly.
Sun was to live another three decades,dying in 1996 at the age of 94. He never recovered from the loss of his pickled‘treasure’.
‘When I die,’ he said sadly, ‘I will comeback as a cat or a dog.’
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UK paperback |
NOW PUBLISHED IN PAPERBACK
And for my American readers, it is now published under the title: The Boy Who Went to War: The Story of a Reluctant German Soldier in WWII available here
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Newly published US edition |
'Idiosyncratic and utterly fascinating... an extraordinary tale of hardship, horror and amazing good fortune' James Delingpole, The Daily Mail
