Zhao Gao was a Chinese eunuch. Wait, stop — how many Chinese eunuchs can you name? I’ll wait while you think. [sound of Pellinore humming….] Time’s up, thought so.
And yet, there were many many Chinese eunuchs. They were very powerful political players in ancient Chinese government. Wily, too, as you’d expect, using their position as trusted slaves to gain political power, and, depending upon the emperor, often able to acquire noble titles themselves. There were plenty of instances in which eunuchs banded together to form their own powerful cabal and even remove emperors.
Zhao Gao, the focus of this entry, was one of the more ambitious of his kind, and conspired to seize power upon the death of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, Shihuangdi. The emperor actually died in 209 B.C., a fact which Zhao Gao kept hidden from the emperor’s son and heir apparent, even going so far as to forge a letter from the father, ordering the son to commit suicide. The father’s letter was convincing enough to get the job done, and therein followed a rather ghastly sequence of events involving the emperor’s decomposing body, an infant son being crowned emperor, a back-stabbing prime minister, revolutions, infanticide (you saw that coming), a puppet sovereign, and an eventual assassination which ended the whole dramatic thing. And that’s just one of the Chinese eunuchs.
You see what you’re missing by not studying your second-century-before-year-one Chinese history! Note: The attractive fellow in this picture is not Zhao Gao himself, whose agent was rigidly stubborn about rights and images and demanded such a royalty payment that I declined, and used a generic profile instead so there take THAT greedy agent.