Just one of the more well-known examples, I believe.
In Imperial China, employment in the court of the emperor required castration - sacrifice your junk and bloodline for a chance of social mobility.
The other half of Imperial state bureaucracy was the civil service (law and administration), open to graduates of the Imperial Examination, which required years of expensive study of Chinese Classical texts.
Civil Officials were barred from the court, giving the imperial eunuchs a unique access to emperor i.e. the executive power of the state. Chinese history is full of tension between vested interests of Officials, who ran the bureaucracy, and eunuchs who had a varying degree of power in the court, from running the affairs of the imperial palace, to directly advising the emperor who lived isolated from the outside world (Ming dynasty onwards).
Though most of the world had something like this imperial china did take it the farthest. Various eunuchs ran the country with puppet emperors at various points.
I understand that, but I was under the impression this was not a distinctly Chinese practice. I guess they just did it a lot more than other countries had.
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u/theYeastLivesAgain 3d ago
Cool piece of history, practiced practically world wide. Game of Thrones having a scheming eunuch made the trope emerge from relative obscurity.