China's Last Living Eunuch -- Sun Yaoting, 91, Recalls Cruelty Of Final Emperor

BEIJING - Once a victim of the whims and intrigues of a cruel emperor, 91-year-old Sun Yaoting is peacefully living out his final years in an old Buddhist temple, under the protection of the Chinese government.

Authorities here say he is China's last surviving eunuch.

Driven to his fate by his impoverished family's thirst for riches, Sun recalled a life marked by fear and pain during his eight years within the red walls of the Forbidden City and thereafter, when he was forced into a society that regarded eunuchs as less than men.

"It was a bitter life in the Ching Dynasty," he said, his sparkling dark eyes filling with tears and his steady voice collapsing into a whimper. "And when we left, it was difficult for a eunuch to get a job. Nobody wanted us."

Sun spoke in a sunny room of the temple, where city authorities who have cared for the remaining eunuchs for decades confirmed that he was the last. "He is the only one," said Nan Chanqqi, secretary general of the Beijing Association of Religion. "That is why he is under such great protection."

Sun learned when he was 10 that he would enter the feudal eunuch servant class - which had served Chinese emperors since the Han Dynasty (from 206 B.C. to A.D. 220) - and underwent a painful castration by his father's hand. Because some eunuchs became wealthy, many peasant families sought appointments for their sons, and Sun was considered fortunate to be accepted.

"I wasn't angry at my father. We were so poor," Sun said, although he was too young to understand the effect the painful procedure would have on his life and thought he was being punished. He couldn't walk for two months afterward.

The concept was devised by rulers who wanted men to attend them and maintain the government but would tolerate no source of rivalry. To accomplish both, and to protect their concubines, emperors saw to it that they were the only fully functioning males in the court by requiring nearly all others to be emasculated.

Sun entered the Forbidden City - the vast imperial court in the heart of Beijing - in 1916. Five years earlier, the Ching Dynasty had fallen and a new republic had been declared, but authorities allowed the emperor, considered the son of heaven, to maintain a symbolic role and maintain his lifestyle.

So as China rushed toward anarchy, the eunuchs continued their time-honored traditions: serving young Emperor Pu Yi hundreds of dishes whenever he was hungry, tying his shoes, carrying him in huge chairs, feeding his animals, emptying his chamber pot, guarding his treasures.

Pu Yi "had a very unsteady temper," Sun said. "Sometimes he was happy, and you could do anything with him, and sometimes he was in a bad mood, and you couldn't do anything."

The emperor once forced Sun to ride a bicycle - even though he didn't know how - and the eunuch fell on the bricks.

In 1924 a warlord gave the occupants of the Forbidden City 30 minutes to pack their bags and leave.

Some eunuchs took to begging on the street, where they were taunted as sexless freaks. Sun said he and some other eunuchs pooled their money and built a monastery in western Beijing, where they grew vegetables and lived in abject poverty, many rejected by their families. "We had to search garbage to find coal to make a fire," he recalled.

After the Communists gained power in 1949, the government took the remaining eunuchs under its protection and sent them to school to learn the teachings of Marx and Mao. No longer viewed as deformed members of a strange "third sex," the eunuchs were seen by Communist society as victims of the corrupt imperial days. "At last we could be happy," Sun said.

Sun entered the 500-year-old Buddhist temple that serves as Beijing's bureau for the preservation of monasteries and temples in 1959 and has lived there quietly ever since.

In 1985, Nan said he took Sun in a wheelchair on a return visit to the Forbidden City, showing him the buildings and courtyards the eunuch had once coursed on his knees. "He wasn't nervous when we went back," Nan said. "His comment was: `Nothing's changed.' "