Petruchio@petruch10
The Han Chinese had a special room for castrating people. They called it the silkworm chamber.
The 蚕室 (cánshì) was a sealed, heated, draft-free enclosure modeled on the rooms in which silkworms were raised. Castrated men, like silkworms, were understood to be fragile creatures requiring an artificial environment to survive. Many didn't. The recovery period lasted up to 100 days, and the procedure was so closely identified with the room that an alternative name for castration itself was 蚕室刑, the "silkworm chamber punishment."
The mortality rate was substantial throughout pre-modern Chinese history and stayed substantial for two thousand years.
In one documented Ming-era mass castration in 1460, the Governor of Guizhou castrated 1,565 captured Miao boys to convert them into palace eunuchs. 329 died. That's the highest documented rate, about 21%, but most periods estimate roughly one in five to one in three.
The procedure varied. Han-era castration sometimes meant only the testicles (lower mortality, the man kept the penis). Late Ming and Qing standardized full removal: penis and testicles together, in a single stroke, with the wound plugged to allow urine to pass and the patient sealed in the silkworm chamber to recover. If the urethral plug failed and urine could not pass, the patient died in agony over the next several days. If infection took, the patient died over weeks. If the bleeding could not be stopped, the patient died within hours.
The crude anesthetic, in the better-attested late-imperial cases, was hot pepper water (possibly Sichuan peppercorn?) applied to the genitals to numb the area. The cauterizing agent was usually wood ash or soot.
The specialist castrators, who by the late Ming were an established hereditary trade group of almost entirely Han Chinese families operating just outside the Forbidden City, kept their techniques as guild secrets. They charged for the procedure, and they charged extra to preserve the removed parts in a sealed jar, which the eunuch would keep with him for life and have buried with him at death, so that he could enter the next world intact.
The jars were called 宝贝 (bǎobèi): "treasures."
This was the procedure the Han Grand Historian chose over suicide so that a book could be finished. He survived the silkworm chamber, spent the next decade as a palace eunuch, finished his book, and gave the emperor who had mutilated him to history.
