A ‘eunuch museum’???

Apparently such a thing exists in China.  The Telegraph reports:

No one knows if, according to custom, Tian Yi was reunited with his private parts when he died. At the time, Chinese eunuchs would carry their “three jewels” with them in a small pouch, so that they could be made whole again in the afterlife.

Sadly, five centuries after his death, there is no record of what happened to Tian Yi’s pouch at his mausoleum, which also serves as the world’s only Eunuch Museum.

We do know that the Ming Dynasty emperor Wanli’s favourite castrato was buried in style.

The Forbidden City fell silent for three days. His body was carried to the west, to the mountains outside Beijing, and placed in a replica of an imperial mausoleum, an unprecedented honour.

Stone carvers worked carefully to decorate his tomb with some of the most intricate marble reliefs ever seen, and even etched small phallic carvings around the bottom of the tomb’s buildings.

More than 250 other eunuchs came to pay their respects, and the site, which now sits in a grey-ochre Beijing suburb that is misleadingly called Pingguoyuan, or Apple Orchard, eventually became the site of a nunnery.

When China became a republic, in the early 20th century, the tomb was looted, and when the Communists took over, it was boarded up and the site became a kindergarten.

Happily, this means it is one of the best preserved examples of a Ming Dynasty tomb in the capital.

. . .

Tian Yi, like many other poor Chinese boys, voluntarily underwent castration at the age of nine in the hopes of obtaining a role in the imperial service, and in one of the museum’s dusty display rooms is a gory diorama of how the operation might have unfolded.

Four life-size clay-brown figures are shown, three standing and one lying on the operating table, stripped from the waist down, and his genitals tied by a string to hold them up.

The Chinese, unlike the Arabs, removed everything, inserting a spring onion into the urethra while the wounds healed. There was no disinfectant, except for chilli paste. Every few years, those who survived the operation would be checked meticulously to make sure no “revitalisation” had taken place.

There’s more at the link.

What happens if you don’t tip the guide at the Eunuch Museum?  Would that be the unkindest cut of all?

Peter