HY2206: China's Imperial Past

Author(s)

Except for a few individuals, it is arguable that most castrati in Imperial China’s history had been rendered nameless and dehumanised in official Imperial narratives written by the scholar-official class. Broadly described as the embodiment of “ugliness” and “evils”, they often appear as the main antagonists during the decline of dynasties.[1] However, confident assertions of their inherent inferiority against their uncastrated counterparts appear to be often accompanied by contradicting descriptions of their terrifying power and wealth. In the narratives analysed by contemporary scholarship, a sense of anxiety may be detected on the writer’s part: palace eunuchs represented a paradox for Confucian society by their existence. The Ming dynasty’s unprecedented increase of castrated men and official eunuchs made these living ‘flaws’ of a supposedly ordered Confucian society an everyday sight for both the scholar-officials and the ordinary subject.[2] To worsen the issue, eunuchs played an indispensable role in tradition and function as the inner palace’s servants; the irony is that the perceived disruptors of traditional rule were themselves a crucial part of it as well.[3]

I argue that the constant anxiety by the scholar-official class in the Ming dynasty towards eunuchs should not just be seen in terms of political or ideological rivalry as current literature does. To articulate this, this paper shall first explore how scholar-officials came to conceptualise the ‘appropriate’ position of castrated men and the eunuch in ‘proper’ society against their own. Subsequently, it switches over to the perspective of the peasant classes and how castration and castrated men were contrastingly interpreted as their economic condition deteriorated in the Ming dynasty. Therefore, I posit that the rise of the palace eunuch in the Ming was representative of a more significant and unconscious challenge against the socio-economic class system, a movement that threatened to collapse the traditional positions of privilege. Socio-economic inequalities were perpetuated via institutionalised notions of masculinity and similarly challenged by contestations against neo-Confucian and literati ideas of masculinity. Emasculation, ironically, proved to be the more accessible route to the masculine centre of royal and quasi-divine power than were the traditional, ‘proper’ routes.

The Master Literati and Domiciled Castrati

There is no definitive theory to explain the origins of the eunuch system, or castration, in recorded Chinese history. Based on the Shang dynasty’s oracle bones that detail ritualised sacrifice and enslavement of enemy warriors, Anderson hypothesises that it involved the emasculation of enslaved prisoners that the Zhou dynasty would later adopt.[4] Other speculative theories discuss the origins of castration as a punishment with a permanent mark or as an imitation of animal husbandry to make docile humans.[5] However, what is typical between these different theories is that emasculation was intended to either shame or dehumanise the individual. A collective, cultural impression against the castrated man was gradually shaped and reinforced through generations of the conscious and unconscious transmission of the degrading nature that the actual practice of castration was intended to achieve. More accurately, castration was meant to reflect the inferior nature of the individual; there is a sense of deservedness rather than victimhood that accompanied the term. Indeed, by the time of Confucius, there were established cultural stereotypes against the castrated: the Book of Odes (ca. 1000 BCE) described the emasculated as equivalent in inferiority and immorality as women.[6] In a patriarchal society, the previous masculinity of the castrati is often ignored as if his emasculation was an inevitability.

Unsurprisingly then, the successive Confucian ideology that evolved across Chinese imperial dynasties would conclude that eunuchs were a “lesser species” by the late Ming dynasty.[7] Hence, to the minds of the scholar-officials in the Ming dynasty, the eunuch of the inner palace should occupy the lowest rungs of imperial society and service. The tone would have been entrenched by the formal declaration of the Ming’s first emperor, Hongwu. He decreed that eunuchs need to be excluded from political affairs and relegated to the domestic chores, agreeing with the scholar-official narrative that eunuchs beyond that traditional post would only destroy dynasties.[8] At best, they would be docile, and good ‘pets’ as Hongwu implied, whose strongest utility to the dynasty was their greatest Confucian moral transgression: the inability to produce children.[9] The disregard for Hongwu’s direction by his successors, and the subsequent ascension of eunuchs by the Yongle emperor, would disrupt this early ‘balance’ that the scholar-official enjoyed.[10]

Contrastingly, the literati enjoyed a similarly long tradition as the middlemen between the government and the people. Considered by Chan to be “practically identical with the landlord class,” Ming scholars (and especially scholar-officials) saw it as an inherent right of theirs to monopolise state administration and policy advice.[11] To be sure, the scholarly class in the Ming could technically be derived from a diversity of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds via the Civil Service Examinations. The continued trend of improving the inclusiveness of examination candidates that originated from the Song dynasty contributed to the growth of the scholar-official community from 5000 in the early Ming to 24 000 by the late Ming.[12] However, it is crucial to recognise that the growth of career students and their more successful scholar-official counterparts as products of an imperial system that had monopolised the authority on ‘masculinity’ and ‘strength’. As the Civil Service Examinations became the near-exclusive means of social advancement by the mid-15^th century, one’s ability to progress through the examinations depended on the ability to conform to state-approved Neo-Confucian thought.[13] Given that the Ming emperors had styled themselves as the epitome – the patriarchs – of neo-Confucian thought, they also became the ‘yardstick’ to which one’s masculinity, and therefore position in the socio-economic ladder, was measured. Thus, scholar-officials as the best performers would see themselves as naturally deserving of a social position of higher privilege and status than not just emasculated men, but also the illiterate peasantry that did not take the examinations.

Moreover, civil service examinations – the symbol of meritocracy and social mobility in late Imperial China – were not as inclusive and fair as a metric of capability as assumed. While it is true that it was a technical improvement over the older system of aristocratic bloodlines that determined the positions of political and economic power, civil service examinations were still costly affairs. Preparing for the provincial to imperial examinations required a monetary and time investment that was realistically out of reach for destitute peasant families. Sun’s analysis of two prominent Ming scholar-officials, Wang Shizhen and Zhang Juzheng, revealed a well-entrenched class of powerful scholar-official families that maintained their position through cultivating influential connections with each other.[14] In short, the civil service examination system unwittingly (and ironically) supported an ‘aristocratic’ lineage of its own. Not only was ‘masculinity’ (and thus deservedness to socio-economic power) monopolised by the examination institution, but it was hereditary to the sons of scholar-official families or their clients for the significant majority of cases. In such a political and socio-economic plutocracy, the institution of examinations would be employed to justify the inequality that persisted between urban scholar-officials and rural poor.

The Empowered Emasculates

Outside of the neo-Confucian bubble, the deteriorating situation in the countryside steered the rural population towards more practical attitudes towards emasculation and retaining ‘masculinity’. While the Ming dynasty initially depended on eunuchs from foreign tributaries or captured prisoners of war, it was soon replaced by the Han themselves in the interest of their own and their family’s socio-economic mobility.[15] The Yongle emperor’s known reliance and trust in eunuchs over the scholar-literati that disapproved of him created an unprecedented ‘golden age’ for eunuchs as they found themselves in a broader range of political, military, and even secret-service positions.[16] With the opportunity to circumvent the typical examination requirement to qualify for positions of great power, self-castration became an attractive notion to post-pubescent men, even if it meant becoming dehumanised in the eyes of their scholar-official counterparts.[17] In other words, the imposed hierarchy of ‘masculinity’ faced decreasing currency as the Ming progressed to its later decades. Indeed, economic destitution by the reign of Emperor Cheng-Hua (r. 1465-1488 CE) had reached a point where the castration of male babies by low-income families became commonplace enough to warrant the government’s attention.[18]

Unfortunately, the repeated attempts by scholar-officials to curb self-castration and the intake of eunuchs would fail as the demand remained insatiable.[19] Moreover, even if the palace would not take them, the castrati would become increasingly visible as those rejected as eunuchs became day labourers in the economy; others formed militant groups that were a persistent security issue for the government.[20] Hence, the image of the domiciled eunuch was shaken as they became part of the everyday alongside ordinary men and women. To be sure, it is unknown how each locale treated their castrati, but it should be noted that those who were castrated post-puberty were outwardly indistinguishable from other men. Given that such types of castrati were significant by the reign of Emperor Ying Tsung (r. 1438-49 CE; 1457-64 CE), it meant that there was likely little institutional ability to identify and segregate the emasculated from mainstream society. That itself was a threat to the neo-Confucianists, who saw the emasculated as creatures needing constant supervision. If they were allowed to participate in social life and economy (or threaten it as bandits), they would challenge what they ‘deserved’ due to their lost masculinity. While unlikely outside imperial service, there was little to restrict the post-pubescent castrati from gaining wealth or local popularity equal to or perhaps exceeding those in the scholarly class.

More importantly, it was impossible to pretend that the eunuchs of the court were the lesser of the scholar-officials by the reign of the Yongle emperor. Besides gaining official positions that were supposed to be reserved for the scholar-official class, now they challenged the intellectual monopoly of that class. The creation of the Inner Court School in 1429 created an ironic situation: the scholar-officials, in the form of Hanlin Academicians, were now responsible for the intellectual uplift of around five hundred gifted young eunuchs at any time.[21] Beyond basic literacy, the more promising of these students also learnt a similar syllabus to those by aspiring scholars and the exclusive ability to write in the emperor’s style.[22] The intellectual ability of eunuchs should not be underestimated in our discussion: what was traditionally a measure of ‘masculinity’ was now paradoxically excelled at by physically emasculated eunuchs. The scholar-officials self-justification of their socio-economic privilege was further threatened as court officials became dependent on the eunuch-led Directorate of Ceremonial for their promotions.[23] If scholar-officials now found themselves largely subservient to powerful eunuch institutions led by eunuchs of typically poorer backgrounds, then did they fit with their ideas of ‘masculine’ any further? The ideological system that kept the scholar-officials in power through a hierarchy of gendered roles was now turned against them.

This reversal of the emasculated and masculine – the subservient and master – was further perpetuated by how eunuchs were perceived in the public imagination of the later Ming dynasty. Chen’s study of the Ming eunuch’s familial legacy reveals their esteemed and revered position in the natal clans should they have successful careers, credited as the socio-economic uplifter of an otherwise destitute family.[24] More importantly, 20% of the tombs analysed reveal an attempt by the natal families to reinstate the eunuchs’ lost masculinity by enabling them to be adoptive fathers of their lineage’s male children.[25] It should be noted that the family clan in Imperial China were typically large networks that could encompass entire villages or a substantial portion of townships. Their family’s honouring of a eunuch was effectively equivalent to the locale recognising the eunuch’s patriarchal role. The socio-economic uplift of these families was a further challenge to the traditional scholar-official families, as living contradictions to the notion of ‘deservedness’ (or inherited deservedness) and therefore challenging the socio-economic hierarchy.

To be sure, eunuchs were not universally esteemed: the later Ming (late 15^th-century onwards) saw the unpopularity of eunuch tax collectors that adopted violent and corrupt means of obtaining tax, likened to “gangsters”.[26] Moreover, the arrogance and lavishness of eunuchs have become public spectacles both awed and hated at the same time.[27] However, regardless of eunuchs being seen as immoral, his roles to the broader public’s imagination concede strength, control, and other masculine qualities. The scholar-officials of later Ming were undeniably besieged by this gradual ‘revolution’ of socio-economic hierarchy and were now at best seen as righteous but hapless; scholar-officials were functionally emasculated in the social and political sense.

Conclusion

The curious thing about tales vilifying the Ming’s eunuchs, be it by Ming or Qing scholars, was a particular fascination of the alleged sexual debauchery. Either through alchemy, incomplete castration, or even accusations that the eunuch was an uncastrated man, eunuchs were depicted as sexually addicted individuals that lusted for pleasure as much as power.[28] Perhaps more exaggeration than fact, these tales in actuality represent an attempt by the scholarly and scholar-official class to explain the Ming social phenomena of the eunuch’s empowerment without admitting the fallibility of their notion of ‘masculinity’. Of course, the Ming’s ultimate demise would be due to peasant rebellions originating from a prolonged economic crisis, and to be sure, framing the eunuch as a fellow rebel would be a stretch. Nevertheless, the rise of the eunuchs should be seen as an early challenger to a suffocating socio-economic hierarchy that justified itself based on the gendered concepts of deservedness and strength. In some senses, it was a social revolution that succeeded for successful eunuchs and their natal families, with a fatal flaw of becoming associated with the very institutions of power that oppressed them and their fellow masses. Hence, their continued vilification in popular culture even after the Ming, outside of some family circles. Nevertheless, contemporary research may help to further rediscover the human behind the two-dimensional label of ‘eunuch’ and ‘castrati’.

Endnotes

[1] Matthew Frysile, “The Historian’s Castrated Slave: The Textual Eunuch and the Creation of Historical Identity in the Ming History,” PhD Thesis, University of Michigan, 2001.

Mary M. Anderson, Hidden Power: The Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China (NY, Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1990), 15-20.

[2] Mary Laven, “Jesuits and Eunuchs: Representing Masculinity in Late Ming China,” History and Anthropology 23(2) (2012): 202-204, DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2012.675794;

Frysile, “Historian’s Castrated Slave,” 38.

[3] Anderson, Hidden Power, 15-20.

[4] Ibid., 21-25.

[5] Frysile, “Historian’s Castrated Slave,” 25-34.

[6] Anderson, Hidden Power, 31;

Laven, “Jesuits and Eunuchs,” 204-205.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Albert Chan, The Glory and Fall of the Ming Dynasty (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 32;

Anderson, Hidden Power, 217.

[9] Ibid;

Tsai Shih-Shan Henry, “The Demand and Supply of Ming Eunuchs,” Journal of Asian History 23(2) (1991): 131-132, https://ww.jstor.org/stable/41930824.

Note: Tsai’s work employs quite emotive language to demonstrate his personal (not just academic) disgust of the scholar-official class. Hence, a certain reservedness is recommended when reading his work, that nevertheless is still useful in understanding the role and image of castration in the Ming dynasty.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Chan, Glory and Fall, 38.

[12] Peter Ditmanson, “Moral authority and rulership in Ming literati thought,” European Journal of Political Theory 16(4) (2017): 432, DOI: 10.1177/1474885117706181.

[13] Ibid., 431-436.

[14] Sun Weigo, “Different Types of Scholar-Officials in Sixteenth Century China: The Interlaced Careers of Wang Shizhen and Zhang Juzheng,” Ming Studies 53(1) (2006): 4-50, DOI: 10.1179/014703706788762608.

[15] Chan, Glory and Fall, 31;

Gilbert Chen, “Castration and Connection: Kinship Organization among Ming Eunuchs,” Ming Studies 74: 29, DOI: 10.1080/0147037X.2016.1179552.

[16] Ibid., 29.

[17] Ibid., 29-30.

[18] Anderson, Hidden Power, 226-227.

[19] Frysile, “Historian’s Castrated Slave,” 38.

[20] Tsai, Demand and Supply, 133-146.

[21] Scarlet Jang, “The Eunuch Agency Directorate of Ceremonial and the Ming Imperial Publishing Enterprise,” in Culture, Courtiers, and Competition: The Ming Court (1368-1644), eds. David M. Robinson (MA, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 134.

[22] Note: In other words, these eunuchs could forge (and they would) formal responses and memorials as the emperor to satisfy their own political agendas.

Ibid., 137-142.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Chen, “Castration and Connection,” 28-35

[25] Ibid.

[26] Laven, “Jesuits and Eunuchs,” 204.

[27] Anderson, Hidden Power, 225-228.

Note: It should be noted that these claims are based on accounts written by scholar-officials or the scholarly class (some by their later Qing counterparts), and therefore should be taken with some suspect as Tsai and Laven cautions with eunuch stories in general. Nonetheless, their circulation with the wider public at that time would indicate the sort of reputation that eunuchs had obtained, and more importantly how eunuchs became associated with power.

[28] Keith McMahon, “The Potent Eunuch: The Story of Wei Zhongxian,” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture 1(1-2) (2014): 2-16, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41930824.