The Los Angeles Times reviews “The Last Eunuch of China: The Life of Sun Yaoting,” who was castrated at age 8 and served the wife of the last emperor, Puyi:
Sun was unusual: Inspired by an older eunuch from his village who had become rich, he decided for himself that he wanted to follow this path. But then the emperor was deposed and the castration had left him too weak for farm work.
The emperor retained the trappings of power in the Forbidden City, however. Sun came to Beijing at age 14, still wearing the pigtail of Chinese boys at the time. He got a job with one of the emperor’s uncles, and later with Puyi’s wife.
He followed the imperial family to Manchuria after Puyi was installed in 1932 as puppet emperor of a Japanese colonial state known as Manchukuo.
Sun was privy to the court’s most intimate secrets, the opium addiction and out-of-wedlock pregnancy of the emperor’s first wife, Wanrong, and the emperor’s ambivalence about his own sexuality. Sun later told his biographer that Puyi was less interested in his wife than in a particular eunuch who “looked like a pretty girl with his tall, slim figure, handsome face and creamy white skin.” He recalled that the two were “inseparable as body and shadow.”
