Eunuchs, a group of castrated people served in the palace, were initially hired to take care of the personal life of the emperors. However, because of their accessibility to the rulers, they sometimes could be so powerful that can control the government. Shi, Yi, a historian in Qing Dynasty, had ever said that”There were three periods in Chinese History, in which eunuchs actually took control of the country. Among those three periods, Ming dynasty was the most severe one.” Compare to their predecessors in late Tang dynasty, eunuchs in Ming dynasty possessed less power as they could not control the military and were not instrumental in selecting the next emperor. However, eunuchs in Ming dynasty was famous because they built their own culture. Based on this background, my question raised—what factors exclusively belonged to Ming dynasty that contribute to the formation of this uncommon culture.
The first unique character of Ming dynasty is the booming supply of castrated people. Before Ming dynasty, castration was a kind of heavy penalty intend to humiliate male criminals. However, after the establishment of Ming, a practice of self-castration became a popular path for peasants to change their miserable life. According to the History of Ming,the most Wei, Zhongxian, the most powerful eunuch in Ming dynasty, castrated himself to avoid the gambling debts. Others peasants, risking of being executed, viewed this practice as a replacement of the civil service examination and emasculated themselves to serve in the court. During the reign of Emperor Hongwu, only a few hundreds of eunuchs served in the palace, and by 1644, almost the end of Ming dynasty, there were 70,000 in the palace and more than 100,000 eunuchs spread nation-wid...
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...icious nature of emperors, and the provision of education, together formed this rarely seen culture.
Reference:
Zhang, Tingyu, “Biography of Eunuchs” in “The History of Ming” (Zhonghua Book Company,1974)
Shi, Yi, “Eunuchs in Ming Dynasty” in “The Notebook of Twenty-two Histories” (Chinese Bookstore, 1987) Chapter 35
Xia, Xie, Ming Tong Jian (Zhonghua Book Company, 1959)
Pan, Chengzhang, Guo Shi Kao Yi (Shanghai Ancient Books Press,2002)
Tsai, Shih-shan Henry, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (State University of New Youk Press, 1996)
Robinson, David, Bandits, Eunuchs and the Son of Heaven (University of Hawai’i Press, 2001)
Crawford, Robert B. , “Eunuch Power in the Ming Dynasty” in T’oung Pao, Second Series, Vol.49 , Livr 3 (1961), p.p115-148
Chen, Yi, “The formation and its reasons of Ming Eunuchs” in Journal of Chuzhou University, Vol.10, No.5, Oct, 2008.
I also found it somewhat interesting that those who were in command of fleets and armies in China were mostly eunuchs. These eunuchs were fiercely loyal to the emperor. Levathes describes in depth how prisoners would be castrated and become eunuchs. Zheng He was the commander for Zhu Di fleet of treasure ships. Despite him being a eunuch he was not the stereotypical one; he had a big, booming voice and was about six feet tall. Zheng He died on the returning trip to China and is now renowned as one of the greatest real-life legends of all time.
In her article "The body as attire," Dorothy Ko (1997) reviewed the history about foot binding in seventeenth-century China, and expressed a creative viewpoint. Foot binding began in Song Dynasty, and was just popular in upper social society. With the gradually popularization of foot binding, in the end of Song Dynasty, it became generally popular. In Qing Dynasty, foot binding was endowed deeper meaning that was termed into a tool to against Manchu rule. The author, Dorothy Ko, studied from another aspect which was women themselves to understand and explained her shifting meaning of foot binding. Dorothy Ko contends that “Chinese Elite males in the seventeenth century regarded foot binding in three ways: as an expression of Chinese wen civility,
Timothy Brook’s book, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China is a detailed account of the three centuries of the Ming Dynasty in China. The book allows an opportunity to view this prominent time period of Chinese history. Confusions of Pleasure not only chronicles the economic development during the Ming dynasty, but also the resulting cultural and social changes that transform the gentry and merchant class. Brook’s insights highlight the divide between the Ming dynasty’s idealized beliefs, and the realities of its economic expansion and its effects. Brook describes this gap through the use of several first hand accounts of individuals with various social statuses.
Common in premodern China was the heavy discrimination of women and a strict social role that they were obligated to follow in order to survive. Women were assigned a limiting job at birth: be a good and faithful wife. For thousands of years, women were portrayed more as employees of their husbands than lovers or partners, and this is prevalent in imperial Chinese literature.
Kingston’s mother told her this story as a warning; to avoid being a disgraceful and disloyal woman like her aunt. Kingston, however, does not view her aunt as a promiscuous woman, but rather a victim or a martyr. “Imagining her free with sex doesn’t fit”, she claimed. Kingston imagines her aunt as a woman who abandoned the traditions set forth by China’s extremely patriarchal society. She saw her and someone who did what so many Chinese women shou...
Qian, Sima. Records of the Grand Historian, Volume 55, House of the Marquis of Liu.
Chang, Kwang-chih 1968 The Archeology of Ancient China Yale University Press, New Haven & London
At the center of Japanese and Chinese politics and gender roles lies the teachings of Confucius. The five relationships (五倫) of Confucius permeated the lives of all within the Heian and Tang societies.4 However, the focus here will be on the lives of the courtesans. The Genji Monogatari provides us with an unrivalled look into the inner-workings of Confucianism and court life in the Heian period. Song Geng, in his discourse on power and masculinity in Ch...
Zheng, T. (2013, August 27). China: Sex Work and Human Trafficking (Part 2). Retrieved April 12, 2014, from Fair Observer: http://www.fairobserver.com/article/china-sex-work-human-trafficking-part-2
Sit, Tony. "The Life of Empress Cixi” (from Issue 10 of the China in Focus Magazine). Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU), 2001. .
Under the guise of making themselves attractive to men, Chinese women endured painful foot-binding rituals that left them scarred for life. We may view such a cultural practice as extreme but are twenty-first century women any less bound to androcentric ideas of what is attractive than our forebears? Foot-binding in ancient china was designed to make women dependent on their men and proved to be a symbol of male ownership that restricted women to their homes, since women whose feet were bound could not venture far from home without an escort or the help of servants.
(1800)Topic 2: A Literary Analysis of the Historical Differentiation of Patriarchal Culture and Female Gender Identity in the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong and the Tale of Genji
Chapter 1: The Wan-Li Emperor, begins by explaining the major premise of the work: The concept of looking at a single year in the history of the leadership of China and evaluating the implications for understanding other aspects of history, including the decline of the Ming Dynasty. In this initial chapter, Huang provides an anecdotal history of some of the events that occurred, and includes within it a discussion of the set up of the leadership, the repercussions that occurred in the event of certain actions, including the prospects of an audience with the emperor. Huang reviews these issues as he considers that actions taken by the Wan-li emperor, who was only twenty-four in 1587 and who had been a veteran of ceremonial proceedings, and considers his history as an element of understanding the progression of leadership.
...oist China.” Gender & History 18, No. 3 (November 2006): 574-593. EBSCOhost. Accessed October 4, 2015.
Examples of cultural constructions can be seen throughout history in several forms such as gender, relationships, and marriage. “Cultural construction of gender emphasizes that different cultures have distinctive ideas about males and females and use these ideas to define manhood/masculinity and womanhood/femininity.” (Humanity, 239) In many cultures gender roles are a great way to gain an understanding of just how different the construction of gender can be amongst individual cultures. The video The Women’s Kingdom provides an example of an uncommon gender role, which is seen in the Wujiao Village where the Mosuo women are the last matriarchy in the country and have been around for over one thousand years. Unlike other rural Chinese villages where many girls are degraded and abandoned at birth, Mosuo woman are proud and run the households where the men simply assist in what they need. The view of gender as a cultural construct ...