The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China (9 page)

Yehonala’s new home, the Forbidden City, stood above even the Manchu nobility, serene and aloof from all worldly concerns–or so it was believed by the majority of the population. For the Chinese it was the omphalos, the navel of the world. It not only reflected the Celestial Order, it stood at the axis of Heaven and Earth and partook of both. The Great Within was a world within a world–China in miniature. The palace bureaucracy mirrored that of the state; there were forty-eight household departments responsible for every conceivable service, from finances and rent collection, through breeding the famous Pekingese ‘lion dogs’, to supplying the palace kitchen.

But this correspondence between palace and nation broke down in one important regard. While the Middle Kingdom’s population conformed to a normal fifty-fifty ratio between male and female, in the Forbidden City the presence of the harem precluded the presence of any adult male (except of course the Emperor) and the only ‘balance’ to the three thousand female servants and concubines was the existence of an equal number of ‘half-men’, the palace eunuchs, within its vermilion walls. Despite historical precedents to the contrary, the official Chinese view was that eunuch’s were harmless ‘creatures docile and loyal as gelded animals’ according to one Emperor.
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Males that could not sire children were believed less likely to commit treacherous acts in the hope of advancing their offspring. Maleness was
yang
, characterised by strength and action; the feminine principle was
yin
, symbolised by weakness and passivity. So it was believed that males deprived of their
yang
would tend towards
yin
; they would be forever accommodating and acquiescent and could therefore pose no threat. What they overlooked was another ‘fact’ of this quintessentially Chinese philosophical system: the association of the
yin
principle with evil.

Strangely, historical records of the eunuch begin in both East and West at the same time–in the eighth century BC. But the practice of employing castrated men in a king or noble’s service is almost certainly more ancient. In China an ancient Yin Dynasty site during the time of the Emperor Wu Ting, yielded a bone inscribed with a two-element pictogram
¹⁰
and next to it another designating the Chiang people, a sheepherding tribe and enemies of the Yin. The first double-character is made up of two separate signs, one designating the male genitalia and the second the verb ‘cut’. Such bones, with a question written on them, were used in divination, and it seems that, some three thousand three hundred years ago, the Yin Emperor, Wu Ting, was asking the gods if he should castrate a Chiang captive.

The making of eunuchs advanced swiftly from the original brutal castration of enemies to become a refined surgical procedure. In ancient Egypt, one of the first civilisations to incorporate eunuchs as a class into its social structure, the wound was treated with ashes and hot oil to control blood loss, and the new eunuch buried in hot sand up to the navel and left for five or six days. Not surprisingly, the mortality rate was high–around sixty per cent of all those castrated died in appalling agony. In southern India the operation was taken to new heights of sophistication. The patient was seated on a special chair and given opium to control the pain. The genitals were clamped between two strips of bamboo and a razor-sharp blade slid down the wood to effect the amputation. The wound was washed with hot oil and covered in an oil-soaked cloth, and the patient kept supine and fed with milk until healing was complete.

By the time of the Manchu this fiendish operation had become something of a profession, with specialist castrators and their apprentices plying their trade at a
ch’ang tzu
, a small hut just outside the western gate of the Tzu Chin Palace in Beijing. The charge for emasculation was six taels.
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Many refinements had been developed: the stomach and upper thighs of the candidate eunuch were tightly bandaged, to reduce blood flow to these parts and so minimise blood loss once the cut had been made. The genitals were washed three times in hot pepper-water to partially anaesthetise them; the patient was given anaesthetic tea and seated on a
k’ang
, a heated couch. Once settled in position, the apprentices held the patient firmly around the waist and thighs as the specialist approached, a small, curve-bladed knife in his hand.‘
Hou huei bu hou huei?
’ he asked (‘Will you regret or not regret this?’). At the slightest indecision, the operation was abandoned, but if the man resolutely gave permission to go ahead, the knife did its work, severing both penis and scrotum. A plug was placed in the urethra and the lesion covered in water-soaked paper and bandaged. Unlike the practice in India, with the help of the apprentices the new eunuch was made to walk around the room for between two and three hours before being allowed to rest. No drink was permitted for three days, after which the urethral plug was removed. Should urine flow from the small hole in the wound then all was well–the operation had been a success. But a lack of urine indicated that the urethra had closed, and the man would certainly die in agony within a few days. However, so accomplished were the surgeons that George Stent, who gathered this information first-hand in the late 1870s, and spent many years studying Chinese archives, could find only one recorded fatality. The amputation took around one hundred days to heal, but it was not until a year after the operation that the new eunuch took up his duties in the Forbidden City.

Physical changes had occurred over this twelve-month period. Those emasculated after reaching puberty lost all facial and body hair (pre-pubertal castrati remained hairless) and their low masculine voices disappeared, replaced by a high falsetto. Muscle tone decreased and more fat was deposited on the body giving them a distinctly androgynous appearance. In addition, they had a characteristic gait, leaning forward as they walked, and taking short, mincing steps with their feet turned out. Some eunuchs did not appear to show these signs to any marked degree, and stories arose that the genitals of some grew back, albeit diminished in size. Other tales claimed that intact males occasionally bribed their way into the eunuch circle in the Forbidden City, and became the lovers of the Emperor’s concubines, and even of the Empress herself.

Several anti-Manchu pamphlets claimed that An Te-hai, Yehonala’s favourite eunuch, was in fact her paramour. It may be that An Te-hai was both a eunuch
and
her paramour, and that he had been emasculated by the removal of his scrotum only. Such a castration technique, though rare in China, was reputed to produce lovers of prodigious endurance. An eighth-century Arab writer on the subject mentions that the Byzantines (whom he calls the Rum):

do not harm the penis, and they only interfere with the testicles...As for sexual pleasure and lust satisfaction, the Rum claim that they (the eunuchs) reach heights never reached by the unemasculated man. It is as if they claim that the eunuch draws out of the woman everything she has, because of his excessive ability to prolong [the sexual act].
¹²

To forestall such affronts to the Imperial dignity, regular inspections were made of all eunuchs in the Great Within. The newly made eunuch was expected to buy back his genitals from his emasculator, and to preserve them in a hermetically sealed jar. The remains (known as pao, ‘precious things’) were treated with great respect and placed on the highest shelf in his quarters, to symbolise their owner’s aspiration to rise in his chosen vocation. They were presented for inspection during an annual examination, and were mandatory whenever a eunuch was promoted to a higher grade within the palace. Nevertheless, rumours persisted that certain normal males had purchased or stolen the
pao
of genuine eunuchs and continued to pass themselves off as eunuchs within the confines of the Forbidden City. This not as unlikely as it first appears. Bribery was rife in the palace, and it is known that genuine eunuchs who had lost their
pao
would sometimes buy a new ‘set’ from the emasculator at the
ch’ang tzu
or hire preserved genitals from a eunuch acquaintance.

Eunuchs were held in contempt by intact males, who called them ‘crows’ because of their grating high-pitched voices, or ‘rats and foxes’. In a society where any bodily mutilation was execrated, castration precluded participation in worship before the ancestral wooden tablets (upon which the souls of the departed descended to receive the submission of their descendants). The eunuch was excluded from those vital rituals which tied an individual to his family and clan, ever the centre of Chinese life. In addition, being unable to produce sons of his own, after death his own shade would remain forever without the solace of the ancestral rites. In this world and the next, the eunuch was an outcast.

As a result, the Imperial Palace eunuchs banded together in an exclusive brotherhood, forming a powerful clique in the tangle of human relations within the Forbidden City. In the 1800s most eunuchs were given a small rice allowance and just two to four taels per month on which to live, twelve taels being the official maximum salary. However, they were also entitled to ‘squeeze’–a percentage ‘tax’ on all goods and services that passed through their particular department. Given the immense quantities of gold, silver, furs, ivory, horses, livestock, furniture, weapons and other commodities such as rice, wheat and timber that were delivered as tribute to the Son of Heaven each year, this percentage amounted to a tidy sum, not least because the eunuchs were in the habit of increasing their tax to truly onerous heights, sometimes demanding one-third of the value of the merchandise offered.

In the hierarchical system of the Great Within, the lion’s share of these riches fell to the Grand Eunuch, some of whom became immensely wealthy. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, a eunuch named Wei, by conspiring with the infamous Madame K’o, succeeded in dominating the Emperor and amassing such treasure that, according to one irate censor, he travelled ‘...in a chariot drawn by four horses, Imperial banners and insignia were carried in the procession. His bodyguard [strictly forbidden to eunuchs by the Dynasty’s house-laws] surrounded him on both sides to screen his sacred person from the vulgar gaze. In every respect his passing resembled a progress of Your Majesty!’ Wei’s undermining of the Imperial dignity was responsible in no small part for the demise of the Ming, and similar scenarios had been enacted during the reigns of the Chou, Ch’in, Han and Tang Dynasties with equally dire results.
¹³
Despite this, and the strict rules against meddling by eunuchs in state affairs promulgated by the early rulers of the Manchu, at the time Yehonala entered the Palace the eunuch clique was firmly entrenched in most areas of Palace life, and they were milking the Imperial milch cow for all they were worth.

A concubine of the third rank was a very small cog in this immense machine of graft and corruption. Yehonala was given lodgings in the Hall of Preserved Elegance, one of the six western halls in the Inner Palace. From the small room that the eunuchs had prepared for her in a row of blue-tiled, one-storeyed pavilions, Yehonala was faced with a career choice of immense importance: should she accept her lot as ‘concubine, third class’ and live out her days in pleasant, if dull, obscurity within the Forbidden City? Or dare she take her chances in the ‘great game’ that was played out behind its massive purple walls, pushing herself to the very centre of things, gambling for power and influence, risking everything, humiliation, torture and even death, to achieve her aims. Given what we know of her temperament, it seems clear that she had very little choice in the matter–obscurity would have been a living death for Yehonala. She wore ambition like a diadem.

But even the ambitious need their share of luck. Despite Yehonala’s claim that the Emperor showered attention upon her during their first meeting, it seems that her good fortune deserted her shortly after she arrived at the Great Within. Along with her cousin, Sakota, she was fated to languish in the harem for five long years, while the Celestial Prince bestowed his favours and his amours upon other, more fortunate, odalisques. It is during this period that she must have absorbed everything she could learn of the arts of love, knowledge that was later to make her irresistible and indispensable to the pleasure-sated Emperor. These must have been frustrating times for Yehonala, both sexually and politically. Her surest, perhaps her only, means of enhancing her position was to find favour with the Son of Heaven. His immense power could be used as a reservoir of protection by those he desired to please. Under its shield Yehonala could pursue her own plans for advancement, all but invulnerable to the cunning of her rivals–while her influence over the Emperor lasted.

But there were other centres of influence in the Forbidden City. Even in her teens, Yehonala seems to have been possessed of an innate political compass which attracted her unerringly towards those with the power of life and death in Chinese political life. Denied access to the Imperial presence for the moment, Yehonala spent a great deal of time during the first few years of her confinement in the harem cultivating these alternative sources of authority, and establishing as large a power base as her lowly position would allow.

Yehonala’s first action was to target the most important person in the Forbidden City. This was undoubtedly the Empress Dowager, the widow of the former Emperor, whose right to filial respect from the new Emperor was unquestioned in Confucian society. In all things domestic the Empress Dowager took precedence–the lower-ranked concubines were less the wives of the Emperor than they were servants of the Empress. But half a loaf is better than no bread and such access to a member of the Imperial household who, within the Forbidden City, enjoyed a rank superior to that of the Son of Heaven, could be used to advantage. Yehonala did all in her power to impress and ingratiate herself with the senior Empress: she was already much better educated than most of her peers, and she applied herself with enthusiasm to additional readings of the poets and classical authors, and further enhanced her status by revealing a natural talent for painting and, to a lesser degree, calligraphy, all of which was certain to raise her reputation in the tradition-bound eyes of the Emperor’s mother and give her ‘face’ with the rest of the court.