Across ancient empires, castrated men often stood closest to power, from Rome to Imperial China.
This episode explains why rulers trusted them, and how some rose high before the system finally collapsed.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something you don’t normally find talked about in an English class: eunuchs, men who have had their testicles removed.
[00:00:35] It might seem like an unusual topic, but eunuchs have played a curious and important role throughout history, all over the world. And today, we are going to tell their story.
[00:00:49] As a quick disclaimer, although I will try to avoid particularly graphic descriptions, there will be some slightly intimate details in this episode, so if you are feeling particularly squeamish, or if you are eating your breakfast right now, well, please take this as a polite warning.
[00:01:09] OK, with that out of the way, let’s get right into it and talk about eunuchs.
[00:01:17] When doing research for this show, I often stumble across unfortunate characters from history.
[00:01:25] People who lived through tragic circumstances, losing children, parents, loved ones, overcoming unbelievable hardship, or perhaps not overcoming hardship at all, and simply dying very young.
[00:01:40] All the sort of stuff that makes me feel very fortunate to have been born when and where I was.
[00:01:48] High on my list of unfortunate characters is a young Roman boy known only as Sporus, who you may remember from our mini-series on Roman tyrants, in the episode on Nero.
[00:02:04] Now, Nero, as you may already know, and will certainly remember if you’ve listened to the episode on him, was a pretty nasty piece of work.
[00:02:14] He ordered the deaths of his mother, his stepbrother, and his first wife, as well as countless other people who got on his wrong side.
[00:02:25] Some historians even suggest that he killed his second wife, getting into a fit of rage and kicking her in the stomach while she was pregnant with his child.
[00:02:37] In the interests of balance, others say she might have died in childbirth.
[00:02:41] Whatever the truth, she died, and Nero went into a period of mourning.
[00:02:48] But then, two years later, in circumstances that are now forgotten to history, he caught sight of a young boy, a strikingly beautiful young boy who he thought bore an uncanny resemblance to his dead wife.
[00:03:07] Nero being Nero, he didn’t just see this boy and get a little bit sad and emotional about his dead wife.
[00:03:15] No, he ordered for the boy to be brought to him.
[00:03:19] And not only that, he ordered for the boy to be castrated, his testicles cut off, then dressed up in woman’s clothing. He was given jewellery, attendants, and told about his new role: Nero’s bride.
[00:03:37] And later that year, he got married; Nero, the Roman emperor, married the now eunuch, Sporus, and the pair lived together until Nero’s death a year later.
[00:03:51] It would appear that Sporus didn’t have much choice in the matter; one day he was happily walking along, minding his own business, and the next he was being castrated and married to the Roman emperor.
[00:04:05] It's one of the most disturbing stories of power, cruelty, and control in ancient history, but it's also a good example of something else — the idea that eunuchs have, throughout history, often found themselves in positions of surprising influence, and proximity to power.
[00:04:26] Now, Sporus’ story is clearly extreme, but he was far from the only eunuch in the ancient world.
[00:04:34] For thousands of years, from China to the Middle East, Rome to West Africa, young boys and even adult men were turned into eunuchs, and ended up playing the role of trusted advisers, military commanders, political fixers, royal servants, and sometimes even the most powerful people in entire empires. Which raises the question: why?
[00:05:03] Why did so many civilisations create entire systems around castrated men?
[00:05:10] Why did emperors often trust these eunuchs more than ordinary men?
[00:05:15] Why did they give them access to the most private spaces in the palace?
[00:05:20] And why were eunuchs, people who suffered one of the most brutal procedures imaginable, sometimes able to rise to extraordinary heights of power?
[00:05:32] On one level, the basic logic was the same in every society where eunuchs existed, and it’s not hard to see why.
[00:05:41] A eunuch, because he could not have children, was seen as someone without personal ambition.
[00:05:49] He could not start his own dynasty, pass on wealth or titles, or be tempted to seize the throne for the benefit of future sons.
[00:05:59] At the same time, because he was castrated, he was also believed to pose no sexual threat, which was especially important in palaces filled with wives, concubines, and female relatives of the ruler.
[00:06:14] In other words, he was a man who might be completely loyal to the king, both politically and personally, because he could not have any descendants and was thought to be sexually harmless.
[00:06:28] In practice, this was a rather optimistic view — eunuchs could be just as ambitious, cunning, or politically skilled as anyone else, and there are cases of eunuchs being involved in sexual relationships — still, the idea seemed to stick.
[00:06:48] And if you are wondering how people thousands of years ago with a very rudimentary understanding of human biology knew that castrating meant that a man wouldn’t be able to have children, well, this is thought to have come from observing animals.
[00:07:06] For thousands of years before the first written records of eunuchs, humans had already been castrating animals such as cows, sheep, goats and pigs.
[00:07:18] They noticed that whenever they did this, the animals became calmer, easier to control, and more predictable.
[00:07:28] A castrated bull wouldn’t try to dominate the herd. A castrated ram, a male sheep, wouldn’t fight.
[00:07:37] People also noticed that castrated animals didn’t try to mate; their interest in reproduction all but disappeared.
[00:07:47] Even if they did occasionally mount other animals, it was pretty half-hearted and never led to offspring.
[00:07:56] So even before people knew how the biology behind reproduction worked, the pattern was obvious: remove the testicles and the animal becomes more obedient and, importantly, infertile, unable to reproduce.
[00:08:14] It didn’t take a huge leap of imagination for early rulers to apply the same logic to humans, thereby creating a class of servants who, like those animals, were seen as loyal, manageable, and entirely dependent on their master.
[00:08:34] And thus preferable to normal, uncastrated men, men who wanted to have children, who might be aggressive, and crucially, were able to be sexually active.
[00:08:46] So castration, in these early societies, wasn’t just a punishment; it was a political technology, a way of creating a specific kind of servant, one who was believed to be safe, dependable, and controllable.
[00:09:04] And we see this throughout the ancient world.
[00:09:08] The very first references to eunuchs date back to over 4,000 years, to ancient Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq. There are mentions of royal attendants at courts who appear to have been castrated, although there is still a bit of debate among historians about the details.
[00:09:29] But by the time we reach the Assyrian Empire, around the 9th century BC, the idea of the eunuch is unmistakable.
[00:09:40] In carvings and palace reliefs, we see powerful-looking officials — sometimes holding weapons, sometimes carrying messages, sometimes guarding the king — described in inscriptions using words that suggest castration.
[00:09:57] And it spread.
[00:09:59] Across the ancient world, from Mesopotamia to Persia, from Greece to Egypt, we see variations of the same logic: eunuchs serving as guardians, diplomats, scribes, treasurers, commanders, and private attendants to kings and queens.
[00:10:21] But it was in one civilisation above all others that the eunuch system reached its most elaborate, most organised, and arguably most powerful form.
[00:10:34] Imperial China.
[00:10:36] If you imagine all the well-known court eunuchs of world history — the ones who ruled behind the throne, advised emperors, led military expeditions, or controlled entire bureaucracies — the majority of the most famous examples come from China.
[00:10:55] And this is reflective of quite how important eunuchs were in Imperial China.
[00:11:01] For over 2,000 years, from the Qin dynasty in the 3rd century BC right through until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, barely more than 100 years ago, Chinese emperors relied heavily on eunuchs.
[00:11:19] And to give you an idea of quite how widespread this practice was, it’s estimated that at the end of the Ming dynasty, in the 17th century, there were somewhere in the region of 100,000 eunuchs in China.
[00:11:38] Most were deployed across the empire as loyal administrators: tax collectors, industry supervisors, and so on. Essentially keeping an eye on the sprawling empire and being tasked with reporting back to the Imperial palace.
[00:11:56] But a small percentage of these eunuchs had a more important role: working inside the Forbidden City, controlling access to the emperor, and managing the imperial household.
[00:12:11] If you have ever been to Beijing, you will know that the Forbidden City is a vast complex: 980 buildings and almost 10,000 rooms.
[00:12:23] It can broadly be split into two sections: the inner court, and the outer court.
[00:12:30] And apart from the emperor, the eunuchs were the only males allowed into the inner court. There were a few exceptions, like young imperial princes or official visitors, but these would be highly regulated, by the eunuchs of course.
[00:12:49] The logic behind allowing eunuchs, and nobody else, was the same as in other societies that used eunuchs: because they were castrated, they posed no sexual threat and would have no sexual desire, so the emperor’s wife and concubines were not at risk.
[00:13:08] Now, most eunuchs entered the palace as young boys or teenagers.
[00:13:15] Some were sold by desperate families, some were taken as punishment or tribute, and a small number chose castration voluntarily, usually because life inside the palace offered more stability than life outside it.
[00:13:33] Once inside, their lives were tightly regulated.
[00:13:37] They were given small rooms, strict timetables, and assigned to departments that handled everything from cooking the emperor’s meals to managing his clothing, cleaning his chambers, guarding the gates, or organising imperial ceremonies.
[00:13:53] They were household servants, essentially.
[00:13:57] At the lowest levels, the work was exhausting and often humiliating. These eunuchs would spend long days sweeping corridors, carrying firewood, or running errands across the vast palace grounds. They were not allowed to leave without permission. They could be beaten for mistakes. Their entire lives were at the mercy of their superiors.
[00:14:23] But every eunuch knew that the palace was also a place where fortunes could change quickly. A kind word from a senior eunuch, a small act of loyalty noticed by the emperor, a minor promotion — any of these could open the door to a better life.
[00:14:44] And at the very top of the eunuch hierarchy were positions of immense power.
[00:14:51] The Chief Eunuch, sometimes called Director of Ceremonial or the Supervisor of the Inner Court, he controlled access to the emperor — and this made him one of the most influential people in the entire empire.
[00:15:09] If a minister wanted to speak to the emperor, he needed the eunuch’s permission.
[00:15:14] If a message needed to reach the throne, it passed through eunuch hands. Even the empress and imperial concubines, who lived in the inner palace, they depended on eunuchs for daily communication.
[00:15:28] This created a curious political reality: although eunuchs could not hold official government posts, they often knew more about what was happening in the palace than the highest-ranking ministers outside it.
[00:15:45] They saw the emperor every day. They heard his complaints. They knew which advisers he trusted and which he disliked.
[00:15:54] They would even witness private arguments within the imperial family.
[00:15:59] That kind of access translated into power, real power, and it didn’t go unnoticed.
[00:16:08] Eunuchs became the subject of deep resentment, especially from the Confucian scholars: the highly educated men who ran the civil service.
[00:16:19] These were men who had spent years mastering classical texts, passing brutal exams, and preparing themselves for government.
[00:16:30] They believed that they should be the emperor’s closest advisers, and guardians of virtue and good governance. Not the eunuchs, palace servants whose only qualification seemed to be the removal of a bit of their anatomy.
[00:16:46] But you can probably understand why emperors so often preferred the company of the eunuchs. Scholars could be opinionated, moralising, and, from an emperor’s point of view, irritatingly willing to tell him what he should do.
[00:17:03] Eunuchs, by contrast, lived in the imperial palace, spent their entire lives serving the emperor, and often knew him from childhood. They were not part of elite families, they had no sons to advance, and they owed their entire identity to the court.
[00:17:23] They were far more likely to go along with whatever the emperor said.
[00:17:27] And who doesn’t like being told that they are right?
[00:17:32] And for certain eunuchs who built close relationships with the emperor, they could be richly rewarded.
[00:17:40] Some eunuchs became fabulously wealthy. Some commanded armies. Some toppled governments.
[00:17:48] And one of them — perhaps the most famous eunuch in all of Chinese history, Zheng He — would go on to command one of the greatest naval fleets that the world has ever seen.
[00:18:01] Perhaps you don’t immediately associate being a eunuch with being a heroic military commander, but China’s greatest naval commander was made a eunuch as a young boy.
[00:18:13] Now, China might have produced some of the most famous eunuchs in history, but it was far from the only place where castrated men played important roles.
[00:18:24] For almost 500 years, the Ottoman Empire made heavy use of eunuchs to supervise the sultan’s harem — his mother, wives, daughters and their servants.
[00:18:36] Like in China, some of these eunuchs became fabulously wealthy, and like in China, their influence depended entirely on the ruler. A strong sultan might keep eunuchs firmly in their place; a weak one might rely on them so heavily that they effectively ran the palace.
[00:18:56] It was a similar story in Byzantium, as well as in various Islamic caliphates and west African tribal societies.
[00:19:04] India is another story, with eunuchs being classified as “third gender”, neither male nor female, which brings us into an entirely different topic that we aren’t going to cover today.
[00:19:17] And there was, of course, the different but still worth mentioning tradition of the castrati, the young boys who would be castrated before puberty in order to preserve their high-pitched singing voice.
[00:19:32] So, to wrap things up, eunuchs are not a quirk of Chinese history, nor a footnote in the story of Nero’s Rome.
[00:19:41] They are part of a much broader pattern — one that appears in empires separated by thousands of kilometres and with completely different cultural or religious traditions.
[00:19:52] Whenever societies had strongly gender-segregated spaces, concerns about dynastic stability, rulers who feared rivals, or political systems built on personal loyalty rather than institutions, they often turned to eunuchs.
[00:20:10] The extraordinary thing, perhaps, is not that eunuchs existed, but that they existed almost everywhere for more than three thousand years.
[00:20:21] And not to get too much into the gory details, but the process of becoming a eunuch, of being castrated, was horrendous.
[00:20:32] It was incredibly painful, mortality rates were very high, often due to infection or massive blood loss after the procedure, and even if a boy was lucky enough to survive the operation, he could look forward to a series of long-term health complications.
[00:20:52] And that's before we talk about any of the emotional or social challenges that would come from it.
[00:21:00] Clearly, it was a horrendous practice.
[00:21:04] And fortunately, by the start of the 20th century, the practice had practically died out. It was officially banned in 1924 in China, and the era of the eunuch was over.
[00:21:18] By the 1950s and 60s, only a handful of eunuchs remained.
[00:21:24] What is remarkable — and historically invaluable — is that several of these last eunuchs lived long enough to be interviewed by journalists, historians, and documentary filmmakers.
[00:21:39] One of the most famous was a man called Sun Yaoting, a man dubbed “China’s last eunuch.”
[00:21:47] He was born in 1902, and castrated as a teenager in the hope of gaining a palace position, but by the time he finished healing the empire had already collapsed.
[00:22:02] He eventually found work inside the Forbidden City, serving the old imperial household, and later worked as a caretaker after the palace became a museum.
[00:22:14] In later interviews, he described the daily life of eunuchs — the strictness, the hierarchy, the loneliness, the moments of unexpected pride, and the deep sense of identity that came from serving the court.
[00:22:31] He also spoke candidly about the pain of his castration, the lost opportunities, and the strange feeling of belonging to a world that no longer existed.
[00:22:45] It’s kind of mad to think. For thousands of years, all over the world, this, I think we can safely say, barbaric practice was a fundamental part of many countries’ administration.
[00:22:59] Eunuchs were everywhere. Then, almost in the blink of an eye, they disappeared.
[00:23:06] All that remains are fragments, stories, records, and the voices of a few men who bore the cruel marks of an old system, and lived long enough to describe a world that no longer exists.
[00:23:22] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on eunuchs.
[00:23:27] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:30] And something you can’t say everyday is that you’ve both learned about eunuchs and learned English at the same time.
[00:23:37] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something you don’t normally find talked about in an English class: eunuchs, men who have had their testicles removed.
[00:00:35] It might seem like an unusual topic, but eunuchs have played a curious and important role throughout history, all over the world. And today, we are going to tell their story.
[00:00:49] As a quick disclaimer, although I will try to avoid particularly graphic descriptions, there will be some slightly intimate details in this episode, so if you are feeling particularly squeamish, or if you are eating your breakfast right now, well, please take this as a polite warning.
[00:01:09] OK, with that out of the way, let’s get right into it and talk about eunuchs.
[00:01:17] When doing research for this show, I often stumble across unfortunate characters from history.
[00:01:25] People who lived through tragic circumstances, losing children, parents, loved ones, overcoming unbelievable hardship, or perhaps not overcoming hardship at all, and simply dying very young.
[00:01:40] All the sort of stuff that makes me feel very fortunate to have been born when and where I was.
[00:01:48] High on my list of unfortunate characters is a young Roman boy known only as Sporus, who you may remember from our mini-series on Roman tyrants, in the episode on Nero.
[00:02:04] Now, Nero, as you may already know, and will certainly remember if you’ve listened to the episode on him, was a pretty nasty piece of work.
[00:02:14] He ordered the deaths of his mother, his stepbrother, and his first wife, as well as countless other people who got on his wrong side.
[00:02:25] Some historians even suggest that he killed his second wife, getting into a fit of rage and kicking her in the stomach while she was pregnant with his child.
[00:02:37] In the interests of balance, others say she might have died in childbirth.
[00:02:41] Whatever the truth, she died, and Nero went into a period of mourning.
[00:02:48] But then, two years later, in circumstances that are now forgotten to history, he caught sight of a young boy, a strikingly beautiful young boy who he thought bore an uncanny resemblance to his dead wife.
[00:03:07] Nero being Nero, he didn’t just see this boy and get a little bit sad and emotional about his dead wife.
[00:03:15] No, he ordered for the boy to be brought to him.
[00:03:19] And not only that, he ordered for the boy to be castrated, his testicles cut off, then dressed up in woman’s clothing. He was given jewellery, attendants, and told about his new role: Nero’s bride.
[00:03:37] And later that year, he got married; Nero, the Roman emperor, married the now eunuch, Sporus, and the pair lived together until Nero’s death a year later.
[00:03:51] It would appear that Sporus didn’t have much choice in the matter; one day he was happily walking along, minding his own business, and the next he was being castrated and married to the Roman emperor.
[00:04:05] It's one of the most disturbing stories of power, cruelty, and control in ancient history, but it's also a good example of something else — the idea that eunuchs have, throughout history, often found themselves in positions of surprising influence, and proximity to power.
[00:04:26] Now, Sporus’ story is clearly extreme, but he was far from the only eunuch in the ancient world.
[00:04:34] For thousands of years, from China to the Middle East, Rome to West Africa, young boys and even adult men were turned into eunuchs, and ended up playing the role of trusted advisers, military commanders, political fixers, royal servants, and sometimes even the most powerful people in entire empires. Which raises the question: why?
[00:05:03] Why did so many civilisations create entire systems around castrated men?
[00:05:10] Why did emperors often trust these eunuchs more than ordinary men?
[00:05:15] Why did they give them access to the most private spaces in the palace?
[00:05:20] And why were eunuchs, people who suffered one of the most brutal procedures imaginable, sometimes able to rise to extraordinary heights of power?
[00:05:32] On one level, the basic logic was the same in every society where eunuchs existed, and it’s not hard to see why.
[00:05:41] A eunuch, because he could not have children, was seen as someone without personal ambition.
[00:05:49] He could not start his own dynasty, pass on wealth or titles, or be tempted to seize the throne for the benefit of future sons.
[00:05:59] At the same time, because he was castrated, he was also believed to pose no sexual threat, which was especially important in palaces filled with wives, concubines, and female relatives of the ruler.
[00:06:14] In other words, he was a man who might be completely loyal to the king, both politically and personally, because he could not have any descendants and was thought to be sexually harmless.
[00:06:28] In practice, this was a rather optimistic view — eunuchs could be just as ambitious, cunning, or politically skilled as anyone else, and there are cases of eunuchs being involved in sexual relationships — still, the idea seemed to stick.
[00:06:48] And if you are wondering how people thousands of years ago with a very rudimentary understanding of human biology knew that castrating meant that a man wouldn’t be able to have children, well, this is thought to have come from observing animals.
[00:07:06] For thousands of years before the first written records of eunuchs, humans had already been castrating animals such as cows, sheep, goats and pigs.
[00:07:18] They noticed that whenever they did this, the animals became calmer, easier to control, and more predictable.
[00:07:28] A castrated bull wouldn’t try to dominate the herd. A castrated ram, a male sheep, wouldn’t fight.
[00:07:37] People also noticed that castrated animals didn’t try to mate; their interest in reproduction all but disappeared.
[00:07:47] Even if they did occasionally mount other animals, it was pretty half-hearted and never led to offspring.
[00:07:56] So even before people knew how the biology behind reproduction worked, the pattern was obvious: remove the testicles and the animal becomes more obedient and, importantly, infertile, unable to reproduce.
[00:08:14] It didn’t take a huge leap of imagination for early rulers to apply the same logic to humans, thereby creating a class of servants who, like those animals, were seen as loyal, manageable, and entirely dependent on their master.
[00:08:34] And thus preferable to normal, uncastrated men, men who wanted to have children, who might be aggressive, and crucially, were able to be sexually active.
[00:08:46] So castration, in these early societies, wasn’t just a punishment; it was a political technology, a way of creating a specific kind of servant, one who was believed to be safe, dependable, and controllable.
[00:09:04] And we see this throughout the ancient world.
[00:09:08] The very first references to eunuchs date back to over 4,000 years, to ancient Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq. There are mentions of royal attendants at courts who appear to have been castrated, although there is still a bit of debate among historians about the details.
[00:09:29] But by the time we reach the Assyrian Empire, around the 9th century BC, the idea of the eunuch is unmistakable.
[00:09:40] In carvings and palace reliefs, we see powerful-looking officials — sometimes holding weapons, sometimes carrying messages, sometimes guarding the king — described in inscriptions using words that suggest castration.
[00:09:57] And it spread.
[00:09:59] Across the ancient world, from Mesopotamia to Persia, from Greece to Egypt, we see variations of the same logic: eunuchs serving as guardians, diplomats, scribes, treasurers, commanders, and private attendants to kings and queens.
[00:10:21] But it was in one civilisation above all others that the eunuch system reached its most elaborate, most organised, and arguably most powerful form.
[00:10:34] Imperial China.
[00:10:36] If you imagine all the well-known court eunuchs of world history — the ones who ruled behind the throne, advised emperors, led military expeditions, or controlled entire bureaucracies — the majority of the most famous examples come from China.
[00:10:55] And this is reflective of quite how important eunuchs were in Imperial China.
[00:11:01] For over 2,000 years, from the Qin dynasty in the 3rd century BC right through until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, barely more than 100 years ago, Chinese emperors relied heavily on eunuchs.
[00:11:19] And to give you an idea of quite how widespread this practice was, it’s estimated that at the end of the Ming dynasty, in the 17th century, there were somewhere in the region of 100,000 eunuchs in China.
[00:11:38] Most were deployed across the empire as loyal administrators: tax collectors, industry supervisors, and so on. Essentially keeping an eye on the sprawling empire and being tasked with reporting back to the Imperial palace.
[00:11:56] But a small percentage of these eunuchs had a more important role: working inside the Forbidden City, controlling access to the emperor, and managing the imperial household.
[00:12:11] If you have ever been to Beijing, you will know that the Forbidden City is a vast complex: 980 buildings and almost 10,000 rooms.
[00:12:23] It can broadly be split into two sections: the inner court, and the outer court.
[00:12:30] And apart from the emperor, the eunuchs were the only males allowed into the inner court. There were a few exceptions, like young imperial princes or official visitors, but these would be highly regulated, by the eunuchs of course.
[00:12:49] The logic behind allowing eunuchs, and nobody else, was the same as in other societies that used eunuchs: because they were castrated, they posed no sexual threat and would have no sexual desire, so the emperor’s wife and concubines were not at risk.
[00:13:08] Now, most eunuchs entered the palace as young boys or teenagers.
[00:13:15] Some were sold by desperate families, some were taken as punishment or tribute, and a small number chose castration voluntarily, usually because life inside the palace offered more stability than life outside it.
[00:13:33] Once inside, their lives were tightly regulated.
[00:13:37] They were given small rooms, strict timetables, and assigned to departments that handled everything from cooking the emperor’s meals to managing his clothing, cleaning his chambers, guarding the gates, or organising imperial ceremonies.
[00:13:53] They were household servants, essentially.
[00:13:57] At the lowest levels, the work was exhausting and often humiliating. These eunuchs would spend long days sweeping corridors, carrying firewood, or running errands across the vast palace grounds. They were not allowed to leave without permission. They could be beaten for mistakes. Their entire lives were at the mercy of their superiors.
[00:14:23] But every eunuch knew that the palace was also a place where fortunes could change quickly. A kind word from a senior eunuch, a small act of loyalty noticed by the emperor, a minor promotion — any of these could open the door to a better life.
[00:14:44] And at the very top of the eunuch hierarchy were positions of immense power.
[00:14:51] The Chief Eunuch, sometimes called Director of Ceremonial or the Supervisor of the Inner Court, he controlled access to the emperor — and this made him one of the most influential people in the entire empire.
[00:15:09] If a minister wanted to speak to the emperor, he needed the eunuch’s permission.
[00:15:14] If a message needed to reach the throne, it passed through eunuch hands. Even the empress and imperial concubines, who lived in the inner palace, they depended on eunuchs for daily communication.
[00:15:28] This created a curious political reality: although eunuchs could not hold official government posts, they often knew more about what was happening in the palace than the highest-ranking ministers outside it.
[00:15:45] They saw the emperor every day. They heard his complaints. They knew which advisers he trusted and which he disliked.
[00:15:54] They would even witness private arguments within the imperial family.
[00:15:59] That kind of access translated into power, real power, and it didn’t go unnoticed.
[00:16:08] Eunuchs became the subject of deep resentment, especially from the Confucian scholars: the highly educated men who ran the civil service.
[00:16:19] These were men who had spent years mastering classical texts, passing brutal exams, and preparing themselves for government.
[00:16:30] They believed that they should be the emperor’s closest advisers, and guardians of virtue and good governance. Not the eunuchs, palace servants whose only qualification seemed to be the removal of a bit of their anatomy.
[00:16:46] But you can probably understand why emperors so often preferred the company of the eunuchs. Scholars could be opinionated, moralising, and, from an emperor’s point of view, irritatingly willing to tell him what he should do.
[00:17:03] Eunuchs, by contrast, lived in the imperial palace, spent their entire lives serving the emperor, and often knew him from childhood. They were not part of elite families, they had no sons to advance, and they owed their entire identity to the court.
[00:17:23] They were far more likely to go along with whatever the emperor said.
[00:17:27] And who doesn’t like being told that they are right?
[00:17:32] And for certain eunuchs who built close relationships with the emperor, they could be richly rewarded.
[00:17:40] Some eunuchs became fabulously wealthy. Some commanded armies. Some toppled governments.
[00:17:48] And one of them — perhaps the most famous eunuch in all of Chinese history, Zheng He — would go on to command one of the greatest naval fleets that the world has ever seen.
[00:18:01] Perhaps you don’t immediately associate being a eunuch with being a heroic military commander, but China’s greatest naval commander was made a eunuch as a young boy.
[00:18:13] Now, China might have produced some of the most famous eunuchs in history, but it was far from the only place where castrated men played important roles.
[00:18:24] For almost 500 years, the Ottoman Empire made heavy use of eunuchs to supervise the sultan’s harem — his mother, wives, daughters and their servants.
[00:18:36] Like in China, some of these eunuchs became fabulously wealthy, and like in China, their influence depended entirely on the ruler. A strong sultan might keep eunuchs firmly in their place; a weak one might rely on them so heavily that they effectively ran the palace.
[00:18:56] It was a similar story in Byzantium, as well as in various Islamic caliphates and west African tribal societies.
[00:19:04] India is another story, with eunuchs being classified as “third gender”, neither male nor female, which brings us into an entirely different topic that we aren’t going to cover today.
[00:19:17] And there was, of course, the different but still worth mentioning tradition of the castrati, the young boys who would be castrated before puberty in order to preserve their high-pitched singing voice.
[00:19:32] So, to wrap things up, eunuchs are not a quirk of Chinese history, nor a footnote in the story of Nero’s Rome.
[00:19:41] They are part of a much broader pattern — one that appears in empires separated by thousands of kilometres and with completely different cultural or religious traditions.
[00:19:52] Whenever societies had strongly gender-segregated spaces, concerns about dynastic stability, rulers who feared rivals, or political systems built on personal loyalty rather than institutions, they often turned to eunuchs.
[00:20:10] The extraordinary thing, perhaps, is not that eunuchs existed, but that they existed almost everywhere for more than three thousand years.
[00:20:21] And not to get too much into the gory details, but the process of becoming a eunuch, of being castrated, was horrendous.
[00:20:32] It was incredibly painful, mortality rates were very high, often due to infection or massive blood loss after the procedure, and even if a boy was lucky enough to survive the operation, he could look forward to a series of long-term health complications.
[00:20:52] And that's before we talk about any of the emotional or social challenges that would come from it.
[00:21:00] Clearly, it was a horrendous practice.
[00:21:04] And fortunately, by the start of the 20th century, the practice had practically died out. It was officially banned in 1924 in China, and the era of the eunuch was over.
[00:21:18] By the 1950s and 60s, only a handful of eunuchs remained.
[00:21:24] What is remarkable — and historically invaluable — is that several of these last eunuchs lived long enough to be interviewed by journalists, historians, and documentary filmmakers.
[00:21:39] One of the most famous was a man called Sun Yaoting, a man dubbed “China’s last eunuch.”
[00:21:47] He was born in 1902, and castrated as a teenager in the hope of gaining a palace position, but by the time he finished healing the empire had already collapsed.
[00:22:02] He eventually found work inside the Forbidden City, serving the old imperial household, and later worked as a caretaker after the palace became a museum.
[00:22:14] In later interviews, he described the daily life of eunuchs — the strictness, the hierarchy, the loneliness, the moments of unexpected pride, and the deep sense of identity that came from serving the court.
[00:22:31] He also spoke candidly about the pain of his castration, the lost opportunities, and the strange feeling of belonging to a world that no longer existed.
[00:22:45] It’s kind of mad to think. For thousands of years, all over the world, this, I think we can safely say, barbaric practice was a fundamental part of many countries’ administration.
[00:22:59] Eunuchs were everywhere. Then, almost in the blink of an eye, they disappeared.
[00:23:06] All that remains are fragments, stories, records, and the voices of a few men who bore the cruel marks of an old system, and lived long enough to describe a world that no longer exists.
[00:23:22] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on eunuchs.
[00:23:27] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:30] And something you can’t say everyday is that you’ve both learned about eunuchs and learned English at the same time.
[00:23:37] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:04] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about something you don’t normally find talked about in an English class: eunuchs, men who have had their testicles removed.
[00:00:35] It might seem like an unusual topic, but eunuchs have played a curious and important role throughout history, all over the world. And today, we are going to tell their story.
[00:00:49] As a quick disclaimer, although I will try to avoid particularly graphic descriptions, there will be some slightly intimate details in this episode, so if you are feeling particularly squeamish, or if you are eating your breakfast right now, well, please take this as a polite warning.
[00:01:09] OK, with that out of the way, let’s get right into it and talk about eunuchs.
[00:01:17] When doing research for this show, I often stumble across unfortunate characters from history.
[00:01:25] People who lived through tragic circumstances, losing children, parents, loved ones, overcoming unbelievable hardship, or perhaps not overcoming hardship at all, and simply dying very young.
[00:01:40] All the sort of stuff that makes me feel very fortunate to have been born when and where I was.
[00:01:48] High on my list of unfortunate characters is a young Roman boy known only as Sporus, who you may remember from our mini-series on Roman tyrants, in the episode on Nero.
[00:02:04] Now, Nero, as you may already know, and will certainly remember if you’ve listened to the episode on him, was a pretty nasty piece of work.
[00:02:14] He ordered the deaths of his mother, his stepbrother, and his first wife, as well as countless other people who got on his wrong side.
[00:02:25] Some historians even suggest that he killed his second wife, getting into a fit of rage and kicking her in the stomach while she was pregnant with his child.
[00:02:37] In the interests of balance, others say she might have died in childbirth.
[00:02:41] Whatever the truth, she died, and Nero went into a period of mourning.
[00:02:48] But then, two years later, in circumstances that are now forgotten to history, he caught sight of a young boy, a strikingly beautiful young boy who he thought bore an uncanny resemblance to his dead wife.
[00:03:07] Nero being Nero, he didn’t just see this boy and get a little bit sad and emotional about his dead wife.
[00:03:15] No, he ordered for the boy to be brought to him.
[00:03:19] And not only that, he ordered for the boy to be castrated, his testicles cut off, then dressed up in woman’s clothing. He was given jewellery, attendants, and told about his new role: Nero’s bride.
[00:03:37] And later that year, he got married; Nero, the Roman emperor, married the now eunuch, Sporus, and the pair lived together until Nero’s death a year later.
[00:03:51] It would appear that Sporus didn’t have much choice in the matter; one day he was happily walking along, minding his own business, and the next he was being castrated and married to the Roman emperor.
[00:04:05] It's one of the most disturbing stories of power, cruelty, and control in ancient history, but it's also a good example of something else — the idea that eunuchs have, throughout history, often found themselves in positions of surprising influence, and proximity to power.
[00:04:26] Now, Sporus’ story is clearly extreme, but he was far from the only eunuch in the ancient world.
[00:04:34] For thousands of years, from China to the Middle East, Rome to West Africa, young boys and even adult men were turned into eunuchs, and ended up playing the role of trusted advisers, military commanders, political fixers, royal servants, and sometimes even the most powerful people in entire empires. Which raises the question: why?
[00:05:03] Why did so many civilisations create entire systems around castrated men?
[00:05:10] Why did emperors often trust these eunuchs more than ordinary men?
[00:05:15] Why did they give them access to the most private spaces in the palace?
[00:05:20] And why were eunuchs, people who suffered one of the most brutal procedures imaginable, sometimes able to rise to extraordinary heights of power?
[00:05:32] On one level, the basic logic was the same in every society where eunuchs existed, and it’s not hard to see why.
[00:05:41] A eunuch, because he could not have children, was seen as someone without personal ambition.
[00:05:49] He could not start his own dynasty, pass on wealth or titles, or be tempted to seize the throne for the benefit of future sons.
[00:05:59] At the same time, because he was castrated, he was also believed to pose no sexual threat, which was especially important in palaces filled with wives, concubines, and female relatives of the ruler.
[00:06:14] In other words, he was a man who might be completely loyal to the king, both politically and personally, because he could not have any descendants and was thought to be sexually harmless.
[00:06:28] In practice, this was a rather optimistic view — eunuchs could be just as ambitious, cunning, or politically skilled as anyone else, and there are cases of eunuchs being involved in sexual relationships — still, the idea seemed to stick.
[00:06:48] And if you are wondering how people thousands of years ago with a very rudimentary understanding of human biology knew that castrating meant that a man wouldn’t be able to have children, well, this is thought to have come from observing animals.
[00:07:06] For thousands of years before the first written records of eunuchs, humans had already been castrating animals such as cows, sheep, goats and pigs.
[00:07:18] They noticed that whenever they did this, the animals became calmer, easier to control, and more predictable.
[00:07:28] A castrated bull wouldn’t try to dominate the herd. A castrated ram, a male sheep, wouldn’t fight.
[00:07:37] People also noticed that castrated animals didn’t try to mate; their interest in reproduction all but disappeared.
[00:07:47] Even if they did occasionally mount other animals, it was pretty half-hearted and never led to offspring.
[00:07:56] So even before people knew how the biology behind reproduction worked, the pattern was obvious: remove the testicles and the animal becomes more obedient and, importantly, infertile, unable to reproduce.
[00:08:14] It didn’t take a huge leap of imagination for early rulers to apply the same logic to humans, thereby creating a class of servants who, like those animals, were seen as loyal, manageable, and entirely dependent on their master.
[00:08:34] And thus preferable to normal, uncastrated men, men who wanted to have children, who might be aggressive, and crucially, were able to be sexually active.
[00:08:46] So castration, in these early societies, wasn’t just a punishment; it was a political technology, a way of creating a specific kind of servant, one who was believed to be safe, dependable, and controllable.
[00:09:04] And we see this throughout the ancient world.
[00:09:08] The very first references to eunuchs date back to over 4,000 years, to ancient Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq. There are mentions of royal attendants at courts who appear to have been castrated, although there is still a bit of debate among historians about the details.
[00:09:29] But by the time we reach the Assyrian Empire, around the 9th century BC, the idea of the eunuch is unmistakable.
[00:09:40] In carvings and palace reliefs, we see powerful-looking officials — sometimes holding weapons, sometimes carrying messages, sometimes guarding the king — described in inscriptions using words that suggest castration.
[00:09:57] And it spread.
[00:09:59] Across the ancient world, from Mesopotamia to Persia, from Greece to Egypt, we see variations of the same logic: eunuchs serving as guardians, diplomats, scribes, treasurers, commanders, and private attendants to kings and queens.
[00:10:21] But it was in one civilisation above all others that the eunuch system reached its most elaborate, most organised, and arguably most powerful form.
[00:10:34] Imperial China.
[00:10:36] If you imagine all the well-known court eunuchs of world history — the ones who ruled behind the throne, advised emperors, led military expeditions, or controlled entire bureaucracies — the majority of the most famous examples come from China.
[00:10:55] And this is reflective of quite how important eunuchs were in Imperial China.
[00:11:01] For over 2,000 years, from the Qin dynasty in the 3rd century BC right through until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, barely more than 100 years ago, Chinese emperors relied heavily on eunuchs.
[00:11:19] And to give you an idea of quite how widespread this practice was, it’s estimated that at the end of the Ming dynasty, in the 17th century, there were somewhere in the region of 100,000 eunuchs in China.
[00:11:38] Most were deployed across the empire as loyal administrators: tax collectors, industry supervisors, and so on. Essentially keeping an eye on the sprawling empire and being tasked with reporting back to the Imperial palace.
[00:11:56] But a small percentage of these eunuchs had a more important role: working inside the Forbidden City, controlling access to the emperor, and managing the imperial household.
[00:12:11] If you have ever been to Beijing, you will know that the Forbidden City is a vast complex: 980 buildings and almost 10,000 rooms.
[00:12:23] It can broadly be split into two sections: the inner court, and the outer court.
[00:12:30] And apart from the emperor, the eunuchs were the only males allowed into the inner court. There were a few exceptions, like young imperial princes or official visitors, but these would be highly regulated, by the eunuchs of course.
[00:12:49] The logic behind allowing eunuchs, and nobody else, was the same as in other societies that used eunuchs: because they were castrated, they posed no sexual threat and would have no sexual desire, so the emperor’s wife and concubines were not at risk.
[00:13:08] Now, most eunuchs entered the palace as young boys or teenagers.
[00:13:15] Some were sold by desperate families, some were taken as punishment or tribute, and a small number chose castration voluntarily, usually because life inside the palace offered more stability than life outside it.
[00:13:33] Once inside, their lives were tightly regulated.
[00:13:37] They were given small rooms, strict timetables, and assigned to departments that handled everything from cooking the emperor’s meals to managing his clothing, cleaning his chambers, guarding the gates, or organising imperial ceremonies.
[00:13:53] They were household servants, essentially.
[00:13:57] At the lowest levels, the work was exhausting and often humiliating. These eunuchs would spend long days sweeping corridors, carrying firewood, or running errands across the vast palace grounds. They were not allowed to leave without permission. They could be beaten for mistakes. Their entire lives were at the mercy of their superiors.
[00:14:23] But every eunuch knew that the palace was also a place where fortunes could change quickly. A kind word from a senior eunuch, a small act of loyalty noticed by the emperor, a minor promotion — any of these could open the door to a better life.
[00:14:44] And at the very top of the eunuch hierarchy were positions of immense power.
[00:14:51] The Chief Eunuch, sometimes called Director of Ceremonial or the Supervisor of the Inner Court, he controlled access to the emperor — and this made him one of the most influential people in the entire empire.
[00:15:09] If a minister wanted to speak to the emperor, he needed the eunuch’s permission.
[00:15:14] If a message needed to reach the throne, it passed through eunuch hands. Even the empress and imperial concubines, who lived in the inner palace, they depended on eunuchs for daily communication.
[00:15:28] This created a curious political reality: although eunuchs could not hold official government posts, they often knew more about what was happening in the palace than the highest-ranking ministers outside it.
[00:15:45] They saw the emperor every day. They heard his complaints. They knew which advisers he trusted and which he disliked.
[00:15:54] They would even witness private arguments within the imperial family.
[00:15:59] That kind of access translated into power, real power, and it didn’t go unnoticed.
[00:16:08] Eunuchs became the subject of deep resentment, especially from the Confucian scholars: the highly educated men who ran the civil service.
[00:16:19] These were men who had spent years mastering classical texts, passing brutal exams, and preparing themselves for government.
[00:16:30] They believed that they should be the emperor’s closest advisers, and guardians of virtue and good governance. Not the eunuchs, palace servants whose only qualification seemed to be the removal of a bit of their anatomy.
[00:16:46] But you can probably understand why emperors so often preferred the company of the eunuchs. Scholars could be opinionated, moralising, and, from an emperor’s point of view, irritatingly willing to tell him what he should do.
[00:17:03] Eunuchs, by contrast, lived in the imperial palace, spent their entire lives serving the emperor, and often knew him from childhood. They were not part of elite families, they had no sons to advance, and they owed their entire identity to the court.
[00:17:23] They were far more likely to go along with whatever the emperor said.
[00:17:27] And who doesn’t like being told that they are right?
[00:17:32] And for certain eunuchs who built close relationships with the emperor, they could be richly rewarded.
[00:17:40] Some eunuchs became fabulously wealthy. Some commanded armies. Some toppled governments.
[00:17:48] And one of them — perhaps the most famous eunuch in all of Chinese history, Zheng He — would go on to command one of the greatest naval fleets that the world has ever seen.
[00:18:01] Perhaps you don’t immediately associate being a eunuch with being a heroic military commander, but China’s greatest naval commander was made a eunuch as a young boy.
[00:18:13] Now, China might have produced some of the most famous eunuchs in history, but it was far from the only place where castrated men played important roles.
[00:18:24] For almost 500 years, the Ottoman Empire made heavy use of eunuchs to supervise the sultan’s harem — his mother, wives, daughters and their servants.
[00:18:36] Like in China, some of these eunuchs became fabulously wealthy, and like in China, their influence depended entirely on the ruler. A strong sultan might keep eunuchs firmly in their place; a weak one might rely on them so heavily that they effectively ran the palace.
[00:18:56] It was a similar story in Byzantium, as well as in various Islamic caliphates and west African tribal societies.
[00:19:04] India is another story, with eunuchs being classified as “third gender”, neither male nor female, which brings us into an entirely different topic that we aren’t going to cover today.
[00:19:17] And there was, of course, the different but still worth mentioning tradition of the castrati, the young boys who would be castrated before puberty in order to preserve their high-pitched singing voice.
[00:19:32] So, to wrap things up, eunuchs are not a quirk of Chinese history, nor a footnote in the story of Nero’s Rome.
[00:19:41] They are part of a much broader pattern — one that appears in empires separated by thousands of kilometres and with completely different cultural or religious traditions.
[00:19:52] Whenever societies had strongly gender-segregated spaces, concerns about dynastic stability, rulers who feared rivals, or political systems built on personal loyalty rather than institutions, they often turned to eunuchs.
[00:20:10] The extraordinary thing, perhaps, is not that eunuchs existed, but that they existed almost everywhere for more than three thousand years.
[00:20:21] And not to get too much into the gory details, but the process of becoming a eunuch, of being castrated, was horrendous.
[00:20:32] It was incredibly painful, mortality rates were very high, often due to infection or massive blood loss after the procedure, and even if a boy was lucky enough to survive the operation, he could look forward to a series of long-term health complications.
[00:20:52] And that's before we talk about any of the emotional or social challenges that would come from it.
[00:21:00] Clearly, it was a horrendous practice.
[00:21:04] And fortunately, by the start of the 20th century, the practice had practically died out. It was officially banned in 1924 in China, and the era of the eunuch was over.
[00:21:18] By the 1950s and 60s, only a handful of eunuchs remained.
[00:21:24] What is remarkable — and historically invaluable — is that several of these last eunuchs lived long enough to be interviewed by journalists, historians, and documentary filmmakers.
[00:21:39] One of the most famous was a man called Sun Yaoting, a man dubbed “China’s last eunuch.”
[00:21:47] He was born in 1902, and castrated as a teenager in the hope of gaining a palace position, but by the time he finished healing the empire had already collapsed.
[00:22:02] He eventually found work inside the Forbidden City, serving the old imperial household, and later worked as a caretaker after the palace became a museum.
[00:22:14] In later interviews, he described the daily life of eunuchs — the strictness, the hierarchy, the loneliness, the moments of unexpected pride, and the deep sense of identity that came from serving the court.
[00:22:31] He also spoke candidly about the pain of his castration, the lost opportunities, and the strange feeling of belonging to a world that no longer existed.
[00:22:45] It’s kind of mad to think. For thousands of years, all over the world, this, I think we can safely say, barbaric practice was a fundamental part of many countries’ administration.
[00:22:59] Eunuchs were everywhere. Then, almost in the blink of an eye, they disappeared.
[00:23:06] All that remains are fragments, stories, records, and the voices of a few men who bore the cruel marks of an old system, and lived long enough to describe a world that no longer exists.
[00:23:22] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on eunuchs.
[00:23:27] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:23:30] And something you can’t say everyday is that you’ve both learned about eunuchs and learned English at the same time.
[00:23:37] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:23:42] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
