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eBook details

• Title: Chinese Palace Eunuchs: Shadows of the Emperor (Essay)
• Author : Nebula
• Release Date : January 01, 2010
• Genre: Reference,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 399 KB

Description

Palace eunuchs have become one of the popular icons of Old China, along with the Great Wall, the terracotta warriors and the blood-thirsty dowager empress, Cixi. Most people have heard of the eunuch admiral Zheng He (1373-1433), whose achievements in exploration, leading seven naval expeditions of mammoth wooden ships, have recently become well-known because of the notoriety of Gavin Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered the World and its similarly titled American edition (Menzies 2002; Menzies 2003). Perhaps some also know of Sima Qian (c.145-86 BCE), the so-called father of Chinese historiography, who was castrated by order of the emperor Han Wudi as punishment for disagreeing with him, but who went on to complete his famous and innovative Records of the Grand Historian. In spite of these well-known examples of outstanding achievement by Chinese eunuchs, in general assessments of the eunuch system, by both Western and Asian commentators, have been uniformly critical. Western perceptions of Chinese eunuchs have long been intertwined with the concept of "Oriental Despotism," the idea that Eastern political systems were characteristically dictatorial, oppressive and corrupt. In this view, palace eunuchs were regarded as a sign of brutality and degeneracy. As Loshitzky and Meyuhas have commented, "eunuchs are perceived by the modern Western audience as grotesque rarities of the past that are associated with the 'otherness' of exotic cultures" (1992: 31). They are most often regarded as a "barbaric, archaic, and uncivilized phenomenon and therefore as an anachronism" (ibid: 34).

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