- #1
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- 38
A strange but interesting story..
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-china-eunuchs6-2009mar06,0,7938113.story
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-china-eunuchs6-2009mar06,0,7938113.story
Emasculation was thought to render eunuchs nonpersons, without ambition or ego, so their presence in the innermost sanctum of the imperial palace did not violate the emperor's privacy.
"The eunuchs were very mysterious and in some ways more interesting than the emperors themselves," said Jia Yinghua, Sun's biographer. Jia met Sun when he was researching a book about Puyi, and recorded 100 hours of conversations with him.
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.