The veil of condemnation and jealousy imposed on eunuchs by the compilers of official history is pulled away to reveal a richly textured tapestry. Eunuchs are portrayed in a balanced manner that gives due consideration to able and faithful service along with the inept, the lurid, and the iniquitous.
Here is the fictionalized story of Tz-u-his, better known as the Empress Dowager, the controversial woman who ruled China for almost half a century. This sumptuous book combines 25 majestic oil paintings of the Empress by renowned artist Zhong-Yang Huang with engaging, anecdote-studded text by celebrated storyteller David Bouchard. Tz-u-his began life as a concubine but managed to rule China while a series of lovers and finally her son actually sat on the throne.
In a series of extraordinary, luminous paintings, Zhong-Yang Huang takes us inside the Forbidden Palace as statesmen, courtesans and eunuchs play out the final years of the doomed Ch'ing Dynasty. The history of Qing palace eunuchs is defined by a tension between the role eunuchs were meant to play and the life they intended to live.
This study tells the story of how a complicated and much-maligned group of people struggled to insert a degree of agency into their lives.
Few eunuchs wielded significant political power or lived in a lavish style during the Qing dynasty. Emasculation and employment in the palace placed eunuchs at the center of the empire, yet also subjected them to servile status and marginalization by society.
Seeking more control over their lives, eunuchs serving the Qing repeatedly tested the boundaries of subservience to the emperor and the imperial court. This portrait of eunuch society reveals that Qing palace eunuchs operated within two parallel realms, one revolving around the emperor and the court by day and another among the eunuchs themselves by night where they recreated the social bonds—through drinking, gambling, and opium smoking—denied them by their palace service.
Far from being the ideal servants, eunuchs proved to be a constant source of anxiety and labor challenges for the Qing court. For a long time eunuchs have simply been cast as villains in Chinese history.
Inside the World of the Eunuch goes beyond this misleadingly one-dimensional depiction to show how eunuchs actually lived during the Qing dynasty. She explores all aspects of their life to the end of their existence, while avoiding the temptation to sensationalize them.
Fictionized biography of Tzu-hsi, the last empress of China, who was known as "Old Buddha". Eunuchs were a common feature of pre- and early modern societies that are now poorly understood.
Here, Jane Hathaway offers an in-depth study of the chief of the African eunuchs who guarded the harem of the Ottoman Empire. A wide range of primary sources are used to analyze the Chief Eunuch's origins in East Africa and his political, economic, and religious role from the inception of his office in the late sixteenth century through the dismantling of the palace harem in the early twentieth century.
Hathaway highlights the origins of the institution and how the role of eunuchs developed in East Africa, as well as exploring the Chief Eunuch's connections to Egypt and Medina.
By tracing the evolution of the office, we see how the Chief Eunuch's functions changed in response to transformations in Ottoman society, from the generalized crisis of the seventeenth century to the westernizing reforms of the nineteenth century.
The Emperor has brutally murdered one of his concubines, something which, everyone admits, he has every right to do Or did he? In the bitterly cold winter of , the Eunuch Gett senses there is something more to this concubine's murder. But when he is ordered by the Emperor to investigate, he is trapped. With all clues pointing towards the Emperor himself, Gett knows that any misstep will mean his very own death by execution. As he carefully makes his way through the maze of harem sexual politics, invisible and ferocious court wars and the seething city outside the palace walls, he must answer one question: Why frame a man who is above punishment?
This gripping novel by Jonathan Kos-Read, China's top foreign actor with over a hundred films to his credit, delves deep into the imperial past, its machinations and superstitions, and sexual customs that remain alive even today.
Customs that can kill a woman. Or bring down an Empire For much of Chinese history, the eunuch stood out as an exceptional figure at the margins of gender categories. Amid the disintegration of the Qing Empire, men and women in China began to understand their differences in the language of modern science. In After Eunuchs, Howard Chiang traces the genealogy of sexual knowledge from the demise of eunuchism to the emergence of transsexuality, showing the centrality of new epistemic structures to the formation of Chinese modernity.
From anticastration discourses in the late Qing era to sex-reassignment surgeries in Taiwan in the s and queer movements in the s and s, After Eunuchs explores the ways the introduction of Western biomedical sciences transformed normative meanings of gender, sexuality, and the body in China.
Chiang investigates how competing definitions of sex circulated in science, medicine, vernacular culture, and the periodical press, bringing to light a rich and vibrant discourse of sex change in the first half of the twentieth century. He focuses on the stories of gender and sexual minorities as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, philosophers, educators, reformers, journalists, and tabloid writers, as they debated the questions of political sovereignty, national belonging, cultural authenticity, scientific modernity, human difference, and the power and authority of truths about sex.
Theoretically sophisticated and far-reaching, After Eunuchs is an innovative contribution to the history and philosophy of science and queer and Sinophone studies.
This volume brings together experts with diverse disciplinary backgrounds in the China field, from cultural studies to history to musicology, to make a timely intervention—from the historical demise of enuchism to male cross-dressing shows in contemporary Taiwan—to inaugurate a subfield in Chinese transgender studies. From , in order to maintain and expand the Ming Dynasty's tributary system, Yongle Emperor Zhu Di reigning and Xuande Emperor Zhu Zhanji reigning ordered eunuch Zheng He to lead giant fleets across the seas.
But soon after Zheng He's seventh and last voyage in the s, the Ming emperors put an end to this activity and ordered all records of previous voyages to be destroyed. This is what Dr. Sheng-Wei Wang has concluded after reading and analysing Luo's novel. Her book, The last journey of the San Bao Eunuch, Admiral Zheng He, shows the methodology and evidential arguments by which she has sought to lift the veil and the conclusions she suggests, including the derivation of the complete trans-Atlantic navigational routes and timelines of that last journey and the idea that Zheng He's last expedition plausibly reached the ancient American Indian city, Cahokia, in the U.
She supports the hotly debated view that Ming Chinese sailors and ships reached farther than previously accepted in modern times and calls for further research. She hopes this book will become an important step in bridging the gap in our understanding of ancient China-America history in the era before the Age of Discovery.
An interesting contribution to an ongoing debate. The existence of eunuchs was one of the defining features of the Byzantine Empire. Covering the whole span of the history of the empire, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries AD, Shaun Tougher presents a comprehensive survey of the history and roles of eunuchs, making use of extensive comparative material, such as from China, Persia and the Ottoman Empire, as well as about castrato singers of the eighteenth century of Enlightenment Europe, and self-castrating religious devotees such as the Galli of ancient Rome, early Christians, the Skoptsy of Russia and the Hijras of India.
The various roles played by eunuchs are examined. They are not just found as servile attendants; some were powerful political players — such as Chrysaphius who plotted to assassinate Attila the Hun — and others were prominent figures in Orthodoxy as bishops and monks. Furthermore, there is offered an analysis of how society thought about eunuchs, especially their gender identity - were they perceived as men, women, or a third sex? The broad survey of the political and social position of eunuchs in the Byzantine Empire is placed in the context of the history of the eunuch in general.
An appendix listing key eunuchs of the Byzantine Empire describing their careers is included, and the text is fully illustrated. In an immense Chinese fleet of hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men sailed through the seas, reaching Indonesia, India, Persia, Arabia and Africa: sent by a proud emperor to bring to the world the glory and the power of the Ming, was commanded by the most famous of the Chinese admirals, an eunuch named Zheng He. Do you need something totally new?
A fresh book you know. You are so out of date, spending your time by reading in this new era is common not a geek activity. So what these guides have than the others? Post a Comment. He took with him intimate stories of the last vestiges of Imperial China and was himself the Fast in the line of eunuchs who had served the royal family for more than 2, years.
His personal journey from poor farm boy to revered servant to Pu Yi and Wanrong, China's last emperor and empress, is an amazing journey which also chronicles nearly one century of turbulence and upheaval in Chinese history and culture.
This engrossing biography by Chinese historian Jia Yinghua features first-hand accounts by Sun Yaoting of his adventures in the Forbidden City, his reunion with Pu Yi in Japanese-held Manchukuo in the s, his return to ""normal"" life as a community organizer in the Buddhist temple where he lived out the rest of his life. Beginning in the early s, Sun's story follows events in China such as Pu Yi's abdication of Imperial rule, the Japanese occupation of China which ended with the conclusion of World War II, China's civil war and the eventual victory of the Communist Party in , the Cultural Revolution , and the subsequent:"" opening up"" policy from which China has emerged as a leading economic and political power worldwide.
The Last Eunuch of China: The Life of Sun Yaoting is a unique glimpse into China's storied past from the perspective of a man who faithfully served China's Imperial Family in the Forbidden City but was later forced to maneuver himself among the tremendous and often turbulent events that became the history of 20th century China. As Sun Yaoting recalls his experiences, he also recounts the life of the dwindling eunuch community in China.
Joy Carlson: Is it you actually who having spare time then spend it whole day by simply watching television programs or just laying on the bed? Posted by sarahmaeller at Email This BlogThis! Labels: books.
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