He died in 1996, in an old temple that had become his home, and his biography was finally published in English this year. This turbulent life has been recorded in the “The Last Eunuch of China” by amateur historian Jia Yinghua, who over years of friendship drew out of Sun the secrets that were too painful or intimate to spill to prying journalists or state archivists. He escaped back to the heart of a civil war, became a Communist official and then a target of radical leftists before being finally left in peace. He had stories of the tortuous rituals of the Forbidden City, Emperor Pu Yi’s last moments there and the troubled puppet court run by the Japanese during the 1930s. REUTERS/HandoutĬhina’s last eunuch was tormented and impoverished in youth, punished in revolutionary China for his role as the “Emperor’s slave” but finally feted and valued, largely for outlasting his peers to become a unique relic, a piece of “living history.” Jia Yinghua (L), the author of "The Last Eunuch of China", poses with China's last eunuch, Sun Yaoting, at Sun's house in Beijing in a 1996 photo.
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