Not such a dumb question

Just stumbled across something that removed some uncertainty I had since a teenager - I remember a fellow (female) student at high school mocking me about my admission that I was technically uncertain as to what constituted a eunuch of old.   What I meant was I was not sure if they were completely deprived of all genitalia, or simply testicles and scrotum.   (In fact, even the scrotal question was unclear, when I later read that the unfortunate boys destined to be European castrati simply had their testicles crushed by hand after soaking in some herbal mix with a hopefully anaesthetic effect.) 

It's something I don't think I have ever bothered looking up since then, but I stumbled across an article today from the Wellcome collection The castration effect, and it notes as follows:

Early Assyrian and Chinese civilisations transposed this knowledge to humans: boys born in poverty would be castrated and sent to work under the yoke of the state in the imperial household. (In China, both penis and testicles were removed – these ‘three treasures’ were pickled in a jar, brought out for special occasions, and buried with the eunuch.)

Well, I wonder on what special occasion a eunuch would bring out his pickled genitalia.  Birthdays, perhaps?    Anyway, it would seem the method used all depended on the time and place.

Someone (apparently a historian) at Reddit gives more detail:

Anyway, here’s Eunuchry 101. There are two basic types of eunuchs in history, “clean-cut” (no penis or testicles) or just a removal of the testes. A simple removal of the testes is historically the most common sort. There’s a third type where the penis was removed but the testicles left, but it’s only referenced in a few places for Islamic eunuchs and seems to have been a very limited thing, and there’s really no reason to do it like this other than punishment.

For clean-cut eunuchs there was basically only one method, cutting it all off in one go which I described for the Ottoman black eunuchs in that link, and here’s the Chinese version from G. C. Stent who is probably our most reliable Western reporter:

The interested reader can go to that link and read in detail the gruesome clean cut method used by the Chinese.   I wonder how many didn't survive it...