[News] China’s Last Eunuch

Sun Yaoting died in 1996 at age 93, but evidently his biographer Jia Yinghua is gearing up for English-language book promos (though it's not out yet, Mr. Amazon says), like yesterday's story from Reuters. "Eunuch" was a career path for centuries in imperial China, in which good executive jobs were available to down-and-out men only if they were dickless, because a regular man couldn't be trusted in the emperor's inner sanctum. So little Sun's dad was feuding with the local chief, and dad figured the only way to get back at the chief was if little Sun grew up to be a power broker so that he could crush the chief. So dad castrated him, and it was gruesome. (Bonus: When little Sun finally regained consciousness, dad discovered that the emperor had abdicated. Punk'd!) (But the new guy let the old emperor continue to live in the city, and he hired Sun, anyway, so things worked out.) There's more, especially about how legs-crossingly "gruesome" that procedure was. Reuters via Yahoo /// New York Times archive

Today's Newsrangers: Peter Hine, Mindy Cohen