Sun Yaoting
Chinese eunuch (1902 - 1996)
Sun Yaoting (simplified Chinese: 孙耀庭; traditional Chinese: 孫耀庭; pinyin: Sūn Yàotíng, 29 September 1903 – 17 December 1996) was the last surviving imperial eunuch in Imperial Chinese history.
Life
Sun Yaoting was born in a village near Tianjin, about 60 miles southeast of Beijing. Born into poverty, his father was a pancake peddler. When he was young, his family's home was burned down and their fields were stolen by a landlord in their village. Inspired by an older eunuch from his village who had become rich, coupled with the family's hope that they would gain Imperial influence and get revenge on the landlord, the family decided to emasculate Sun. In 1911, at the age of eight, Sun was emasculated by his father at home on their bed with a single razor cut, without the use of anesthesia. A piece of oil-soaked paper was used as a bandage, while a goose quill was inserted in Sun's urethra to prevent it from getting blocked as the wound healed. Sun remained unconscious for three days and could barely move for two months.
However, the emperor he had hoped to serve, Puyi, had abdicated several weeks before his recovery during the Xinhai Revolution.
Nonetheless, Sun went to Beijing at age 14.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Sun Yaoting” as chinese eunuch (1902 - 1996). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3080719. VIAF identifies the subject as 64810620. The Library of Congress control number is nr94017996. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1903, 1996 and 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sun Yaoting” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.