The Eunuch in History and on TV
Chinese and Korean depictions of these imperial servants raise so many more questions than they answer.
Heads up: This post discusses some pretty upsetting history about topics like bodily autonomy, child trafficking, body modification and gender. Please take care of yourself however you see fit. ✶
I was already in college when I spotted Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt at a used bookstore, a perfect and slightly battered mass market paperback. My favorite Christmas novel is Doomsday Book, a Connie Willis masterpiece about a time travel malfunction and witnessing the Black Death, so I was absolutely ready to dive into this book. Robinson’s conceit is that the bubonic plague of the 14th century has killed off virtually every European. In their absence, humanity progresses and regresses on new and fascinating tracks throughout Africa and Asia. A cohort of karmically connected characters return again and again.
In one of the early chapters, we meet a young boy captured by Chinese pirates from East Africa. While they’re sailing back to Great Ming, the boy is collected from his bunk and inspected by one of his captors. I blithely read on, intrigued by the reveal that this kid is already figuring out how to communicate in Chinese. I was not prepared when, with very little fanfare, his inspector takes up a knife and performs a hideous act of violence right then and there!
The boy grows up to become a powerful, brilliant political mind in the Ming court. That scene has stayed with me for decades, though, and I have always wondered how off-base or true to history it might be.
Eunuchs are figures of profound discomfort for both characters in stories and their viewers. We know precisely what has happened to them and wonder whether it was truly consensual, how they bore it, how they conceive of themselves. When they appear in palace dramas, not many are offered depictions as more than set dressing. Those who are may become feminized schemers, power-hungry manipulators, pitiable pushovers, put-upon minders of feisty main characters or irritable bureaucrats who just want to exit a scene.
The Red Sleeve is a Korean drama centered on the inner lives and relationships of palace maids, a welcome corrective to a purposefully invisible workforce. I haven’t yet found a series with a similar focus on eunuchs, but I would welcome it. As far removed as this history feels, it’s not that deep in the past: the last imperial Chinese eunuch only died in 1996 — just a decade before I read The Years of Rice and Salt.
Your questions, answered
One problem I have battled not just in writing this newsletter but in life overall is over-researching. There is simply so much amazing material about absolutely every topic I’ve written about here, and it’s so easy to get deep in the weeds with JSTOR and whatever remains of Google. To that end, I’m going to keep this post relatively streamlined. Most of my information comes from Dr. Melissa Dale’s 2018 book Inside the World of the Eunuch: A Social History of the Emperor’s Servants in Qing China. I’ve got a million tabs open about envoy eunuchs, eunuch machismo, why Ming Dynasty eunuchs were so particularly powerful, the economics of eunuchs… you can see why my life-saving One Tab extension groans under my curiosity.
I already hope to revisit the topic in more detail, especially since most of my history comes from China, while most of the most interesting depictions of eunuchs come from Korean dramas. This is a long lead-in to say that if you’d rather avoid some of the gnarly details of life as a eunuch in imperial China, the time to turn back is probably now.
Eunuchs have existed throughout history all over the world. In China, we have records or mentions dating back to the Shang dynasty, more than three and a half thousand years ago. Both the Roman and Ottoman empires employed eunuchs; I know less about their conditions, but in China, eunuchs were not simply castrated (removing the testes); all the external genitalia were removed in order to become a eunuch candidate.1 The preserved genitals (called bao, or treasure) were kept by the palace (which required them as evidence for promotions) on behalf of the eunuch, who could plan to be buried with them — unless they were rented out or sold to another eunuch or his family.
Men and boys of all ages became eunuchs for a wide variety of reasons over the millennia in China. Some were adults who saw a path to steady employment and relative comfort in palace work, and submitted to the procedure as a way of securing income for themselves and their families. Some were non-Han minorities kidnapped during war and emasculated2 in service of ethnic cleansing. Some were prisoners given the option to escape the death penalty. Some were children whose families were too poor or indebted to raise money; these boys were trafficked, and many wrenching accounts survive of being forced into the procedure, including by surprise.3
“The colloquial term for emasculation, chu jia (出家 leaving home),” Dale tells us, “symbolized the act’s intention — with the cut of a knife — to destroy former familial and social bonds.” It was a feature, not a bug, that becoming such an outcast would bind the eunuch irreversibly to those he served. Yet Confucian norms stand in profound conflict with such a practice. In a society where one must not even cut their hair because the body is a gift from your parents and to your line, there must be an exceptional counterweight on offer.
It turns out that incentive was service to the emperor — and the livelihood that came with it. Because eunuchs worked in a royal or imperial family’s inner court, no one able to disrupt a bloodline could be considered for palace employment. And yet, the palace must run. While dramas often depict eunuchs as a sort of luxury etiquette droid, the vast majority were actually illiterate and performed manual or menial labor. For all the imperial court relied on them, eunuchs were regarded with profound suspicion by the rest of the palace.
Perhaps with good reason: Legend and history alike record eunuchs who have seduced kings, fomented coups, corrupted women, led armies, explored the known world and otherwise lived exceptional lives. Paranoia about whether eunuchs were properly male or thoroughly purified occasionally provoked fears that their genitals could regenerate, “necessitating” further surgeries. “While genital mutilation was intended [by the Manchurian rulers of the Qing dynasty] to subjugate and neuter Chinese men,” writes Sinologist Charlotte Furth, because eunuchs could move between male and female spheres both inside and outside the palace, “in reality, emasculation rendered eunuchs ‘sexually and politically charged.’”
For all the ways the outside world regarded them, the preponderance of evidence indicates that Chinese and Korean eunuchs saw themselves as fully male, rather than “half-female” or some acknowledged third sex. Their ambiguity, in Confucian terms, was not solely that they couldn’t procreate, but that they were imbalanced and full of yin energy. Still, as one late-Qing eunuch reflected:
“It seemed a little thing to give up one pleasure for so many. My parents were poor, yet by suffering that small change, I could be sure of an easy life in surroundings of beauty and magnificence; I could aspire to intimate companionship with lovely women unmarred by their fear or distrust of me. I could even hope for power and wealth of my own. With good fortune and diligence, I might grow more rich and powerful than some of the greatest officials in the empire.”
Who and what we see
To film and TV producers and audiences alike, eunuchs are targets of fascination. They signal to the viewer that we are immersed in a very different time and place from our own; they challenge our conceptions of masculinity, gender and power; they easily risk becoming objectified and flat; they come with no small amount of baggage in the history they represent. Though their roles are immensely proscribed, we don’t know what to expect from them: resentful and violent, like the Ming emissary Tae Gam (Park Ki-woong) in The King’s Affection? off-beat and dangerous, like right-hand man Ding Rong (Yu Mingxuan) in Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty? hilarious and empathetic, like Heo Sam-bo (Sung Ji-ru) in Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung? Or will they be ciphers, less a functionary than a function of the palace itself?
The tropes we hang on TV eunuchs are, of course, stories we tell about women and disfavored minorities. Maybe they’ll betray us, or maybe they’ll stay servile. Maybe they’re lying about something. Maybe they have ulterior motives. Maybe, as Love in the Moonlight posits, they’re in disguise as something else entirely, for better or for worse. We just can’t know — despite the outward marks of their status, that knowledge is closed off to us. Who knows what the help is really thinking?
For every hour of TV I watch, I often wish for a corresponding hour-plus of behind-the-scenes material. I wonder about how actors approach playing eunuchs, from the extras to the main roles, and how they reflect on it as part of their career. Scholars, activists and fans also bring incredibly rich queer and trans readings to histories and performances. Dale’s book alone offers a wealth of possible characters and storylines. I haven’t even mentioned the hereditary “knife experts” who performed the procedure and looked after the eunuch candidates while they recovered; the maidservants who sometimes fell in love with and even married eunuchs, especially late in the final dynasty; the Korean eunuchs whose emasculation added years to their lifespans; the scholar-officials who resented that eunuchs gained power not through study and the civil service exam but from giving up what made them masculine in the first place.
We do know more about the last of the imperial Chinese eunuchs, with great thanks to some incredible oral histories. This trailer for the 1988 feature Lai Shi, China’s Last Eunuch dramatizes how eunuchs survived the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the start of the Republican era. It frankly portrays the physiological and emotional histories of these men in a world that’s actively leaving them behind. The more I read, the more I watch, the more I’m fascinated by how much I don’t know yet. How lucky we are, to get to feel like this. ✶
Do you have a favorite cdrama or kdrama eunuch? Let me know in the comments or on Bluesky. I love recs and growing my teetering to-watch list.
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Not every eunuch candidate was selected to enter the palace, and those who were passed over faced a future even more precarious than the ones they’d fled. Some actually became monks, as did some eunuchs who were retired or phased out from their service; the same colloquialism, chu jia (出家 leaving home), was used for both.
Dale consciously chooses the term “emasculation” for its medical accuracy, while acknowledging the word is often pejorative in English and especially problematic in the West regarding East Asian men.
“Within a patriarchal and hierarchically organized society such as the Qing, the wishes of elders and the good of the family took precedence over individual concerns, especially those of minors,” Dale writes. “In the case of emasculation, this resulted in the complete negation of a boy’s rights over his own body. […] When asked houhui bu houhui (後悔不後悔 Will you regret it?), the parent’s or sponsor’s negative response would serve as the only permission necessary for the daozijiang [government-licensed ‘knife expert’] to proceed.”