How China Became a “Castrated Civilization” and Eunuchs a “Third Sex”

Although eunuchs had played an important role in the history of imperial China, it is surprising how little attention historians have paid to the actual measures of Chinese castration. Like footbinding, castration stands as one of the most important objects of Sinological criticism today. Both have come to represent powerful symbols of backwardness, oppression, despotism, and national shame in modern Chinese historiography. Starting in the early Republican period, cultural commentators often labeled late imperial China as a “castrated civilization” (被閹割的文明, beiyange de wenming), a characterization that perpetuated its more common perception as the “Sick Man of Asia” that emerged in the nineteenth century.1 Simply put, observers, domestic and foreign alike, invoked the former trope to cast the practice of castration and the institution of palace eunuchs as pitfalls of dynastic China. But unlike the history of footbinding, Sinologists have remained considerably silent on the history of the castration operation itself. This chapter aims to move beyond this historiographical limitation. I approach eunuchism (the bodily state of castrated men), like other forms of embodiment, as a category of experience that needs to be historicized rather than foundational or uncontestable in nature.2 The distaste for eunuchs and the antipathy for the Chinese imperium became isomorphic during the peak of Western overseas imperial and colonial expansions.3 In China’s tremulous transition to a modern