i love the hilarious eunuch ranking system by @welcometothejianghu so i decided to make one based on (mostly) REAL historical chinese enunchs!
in chronological order:
Warring States Period long story short, the PM is sleeping with the Empress Dowager, and he wants to extracate himself before her son (future Emperor Qin Shi Huang) gets old enough to find out. the PM finds her a suitable replacement, and the replacement is attached to a guy named Lao Ai. They pluck his beard and pass him off as a eunuch so he can sneak into the palace. Bing bang boom everyone's happy. This goes terribly wrong later, since Lao Ai tries to replace the emperor with his own kids and stages a failed coup. rest in pieces buddy...
it's very likely that Lao Ai was a ficticious character invented by Sima Qian, who will be appearing on this list later.
Qin Dynasty
Zhao Gao helped the first emperor of China conquer an empire, and administer it efficiently with his legal knowledge, but he also made the second emperor into a puppet, and weakened the empire for his own political gain. Max points of complexity, but you'd get more loyalty out of a coffee club punch card.
Before launching his soft coup, he decided to test the waters by bring in a deer and gaslighted the emperor by calling it a horse. the officials who were loyal to him called it a horse, and he executed the rest.
Han Dynasty Jiru, male favourite of Emperor Gaozu (Liu Bang), the peasant scoundrel who became the founder of the Han Dynasty. look, if the emperor has a harem of hundreds of women and you manage to catch his attention, you max out in style points. simple as. for most of chinese history it was fairly common for high-ranking men, especially eunuchs, to wear make up like powder and rouge, but i decided to give Jiru some women's huadia as well, cause he's a baddie.
Jiru gets a bad rap for alledgely distracting the emperor from his duties, but lets be real, history is written by civil officials who have no shortage of professional jealousy and gender/sexuality related prejudice towards eunuchs, since they were the personal attendants of royalty and could exert a lot of influence. plus Liu Bang was already pissing in the hats of confucian scholars, most of the poor work ethic is on HIM. Jiru should get credit for making him marginally less of a troglodite.
all in all he didn't try any court intrigue so extra points for loyalty and complexity. free my man >:( he's just a Han dynasty Monica Lewinsky who got slutshamed by jealous coworkers >:(
Han Dynasty
meet the father of east asian history, sima qian. half the people on this list can owe their placement here thanks to his extremely though history books "records of the grand historian"
history at this time was mostly "creative writing" and sima qian attempted to give the practise more academic intergrety, he went out and personally interviewed people, tried to get primary sources, and got rid of most of the more fanstastical aspects. however, he was not without his biases and some texts can be seen as allegorical/veiled insults towards the Han Dynasty, especially towards Emperor Wu. unlike most of the people on this list, sima qian was from the gentry and castated later in life as a punishment for treason. he was implicated after trying to defend a friend, and could not pay the fine to commute his sentence. the gentlemen at the time were expected to die by suicide rather than live with such ignimony, but sima qian chose to live so he could finish writing the history book his father started. the "giant conspiracy" joke explained: the chinese word for penis is a homophone for "conspiracy".
