Eunuchs have long occupied one of the most paradoxical positions in Asian history: guardians of emperors yet outcasts of society, sacred dancers yet targets of ridicule, political kingmakers whose bodies bore lifelong scars. Across South, Southeast and East Asia, their story reveals a deeply layered understanding of gender, purity, hierarchy, and suffering—alongside the quiet resilience of those who lived between the lines of masculinity and spirituality.
In imperial China, eunuchs were indispensable to palace life for nearly two millennia. Known as taijian (太监, “great supervisors”), they were the only men permitted inside the hougong (後宮, “inner palace”), where empresses, concubines and royal children lived. Their castration—performed through partial or total removal of reproductive organs using pressure, herbal antiseptics or heated instruments—was meant to guarantee loyalty, not to inflict torture, though the procedure was dangerous and painful. Many boys died of shock or infection; those who survived often faced chronic complications such as urinary difficulties, recurrent infections and endocrine imbalances that weakened their bones and muscles. And yet, some rose to immense power. Zheng He, the Ming admiral who sailed as far as East Africa, is the most famous example; others became kings’ confidants, political strategists, or feared intelligence officers. Their access to emperors gave them influence unmatched by many generals or ministers. Still, outside the palace gates, Confucian society viewed eunuchs as morally suspect and “unnatural,” violating the filial rule that the body should not be harmed. Respect and contempt lived side by side.
Vietnam’s hoạn quan mirrored this duality. Castrated boys served the Lê and Nguyễn courts as palace administrators, diplomats, financial stewards and guardians of royal women. They could accumulate wealth, land and status, but their social world remained circumscribed. Court chronicles describe both their sophistication and the stigma they endured, including mockery from scholars and exclusion from conventional family life. Some eunuchs formed households; others lived in loneliness, marked by physical frailty that worsened with age.
South Asia, by contrast, offered a more explicitly spiritual framing. Communities now broadly referred to as Hijra—encompassing transgender, intersex, and ritually castrated individuals—have ancient roots in Hindu cosmology. Sanskrit words such as kliba (neither man nor woman) and napumsaka (non-masculine person) reflect a long-standing awareness of gender diversity. For some devotees, undergoing nirvan (emasculation) was a sacred vow to Bahuchara Mata, a goddess associated with protection, transformation and sexual restraint. Hijras were welcomed at weddings and births to confer blessings believed to enhance fertility. Within their own communities, they forged strong kinship networks and maintained rich cultural traditions of music, dance, and ritual. Yet the suffering was real. Many joined Hijra households after being rejected by birth families; others were pushed into sex work, begging or informal labor due to discrimination. British colonial authorities intensified this marginalization by labeling them “criminal eunuchs” and restricting their movement. Health complications from ritual or informal castration—often performed without medical safeguards—left many with chronic pain, urinary issues and dramatically shortened lifespans.
In Southeast Asia, castrated individuals were less central to state structures but still played distinctive roles. Khmer inscriptions mention eunuchs serving Angkorian temples and royal households, often brought from Champa or China. In Myanmar and Thailand, gender-nonconforming mediums, including castrated or trans feminine persons, acted as vessels for spirits during rituals, their liminality seen as spiritually potent. Performers and attendants in Javanese and Siamese courts occupied a spectrum of gendered roles, some deliberately blurring masculinity and femininity to embody cosmic harmony. Yet stigma persisted. Many eunuchs—valued in ritual but shunned in daily life—struggled with social exclusion, limited marriageability, and precarious livelihoods.
Across Asia, the making of a eunuch was imagined not simply as a physical alteration but as a transformation into a liminal being: someone who could navigate spaces forbidden to ordinary men, who could serve gods and kings with equal devotion. But beneath the symbols of purity, loyalty, and sacred power lay bodies that had endured irreversible trauma, and souls that often bore the weight of loneliness, ridicule and physical suffering. Their history is a reminder that privilege and pain can coexist—and that societies across Asia once held far more complex views of gender than even they acknowledged.
Another little incursion into the gender history of our region, darlings—and what a bittersweet journey it is. We love to tell grand stories: the admiral who crossed oceans, the kingmaker who whispered into imperial ears, the royal guardian who held the keys to the forbidden chambers. Yes, a few eunuchs lived lives gilded with power, privilege, and poetry. But let’s not kid ourselves. Those glittering exceptions are just that—exceptions. For every Zheng He steering a fleet across the Arabian Sea, thousands of our poor brothers were cleaning floors, guarding corridors, or surviving as temple attendants, swallowed by the palace machinery or by society’s cruelty.
Imagine being a young boy, forced—by poverty, war, slavery, or sheer family desperation—into a whirlwind of physical pain and identity upheaval. Your body altered forever, not as a choice of selfhood but as an offering to other people’s ambitions. Many survived, yes, but at what cost? Chronic pain, infection, fragility, loneliness. Some rose high in courts, but most lived in the shadows, serving queens, concubines, monks, monks’ cats, whoever needed their labor. They existed in that liminal place Asian societies love to create: useful, sacred even, but not quite “one of us.”
And here’s the part your Auntie will shout until her chili necklace rattles: gender variance is not new. It is not “Western.” It is not a trend, a contagion, or a rebellion invented by TikTok. Our region—South, Southeast, East Asia—has always known that the human soul refuses to sit neatly in two little boxes labeled “M” and “F.” The hijra are still here, radiant and resilient. So are the kathoey of Thailand, the spirit mediums of Myanmar, the waria of Indonesia. Not to mention the modern non-binary kids who, unlike their predecessors, can finally speak their truth without having to sacrifice their bodies at an altar of cultural expectations.
But behind every gender role, sacred or stigmatized, there is a simple truth we forget. At the base of it all lies our common human nature: the need to belong, to be respected, to live without fear, to love and be loved, to inhabit our bodies without shame or coercion. Whether they were imperial strategists, temple dancers, or street beggars, the eunuchs of our past shared that same longing.
So let’s remember the eunuchs with compassion—and learn from what was done to them, and what they made of themselves despite it.