AHQ: Elimination of Eunuchs in China in the 17th Century?

Alright, so I'm working on a quasi-serious TL (it'll never be a full written thing, but it will have maps and a general history) and something I was considering were the Eunuchs in China.

My basic idea is that the Ming Dynasty collapses (a decade ahead of OTL) and, after a Civil War (butterflies lead to the Manchu's developing differently and never trying to expand into China) the new Emperor, who was from a side-branch of the previous Imperial family, comes to power and begins several major changes and assumes more direct power himself.

The Emperor deeply distrusts Eunuchs and views them as responsible for the fall of the previous dynasty (and lots of other problems) and eventually comes to adhering to a set of beliefs that Eunuchs mere existence is a major violation of the natural order as it upsets the balance of energies (Yin and Yang, Male and Female) and thus orders that any remaining Eunuchs be stripped of any power and authority and that castration, except in cases of certain crimes, be forbidden, later declaring that anyone who is castrated shall be forbidden from serving in government/imperial service.


Now the questions I have are thus; assuming that the Ming eunuchs no longer have power (mixture of being killed in the war and not managing to gain the ear of the really important people of the new order), how long would it take to implement this policy and how effective would it be over the following few decades; secondly, assuming the policy is continued under the next Emperor, how long would it take for the idea of Eunuchs to die out/be accepted as negative by enough people that the practice would simply become unacceptable regardless of if the current emperor opposed it or not?
 
I don't know, The whole thing with Eunuchs is that you could trust them not to sleep with your wife and other concubines. There must a been a reason to keep them even after periods of strife like in the Late Han, where the Eunuchs practically ruined the state. It's a bit of stretch but Romance of the Kingdoms came out in the Ming, so maybe these new rulers inspired from what they read, do away with the Eunuchs.
 

Nihao

Banned
Okay, I would bring out as many things as I can in my brain to discuss the thought. It might be messy, and even wrong, but I would just make a try and take the criticisms wholeheartedly.

Well, first thing first, you would have to please the Confucians if you wanted new policies to be accepted.The Confucian scholars dominated most of the public opinion, as they were considered to be more educated around the villiages, and if the villiagers got any problems with each other, the scholars, not the officer, would always be the judge, and the rural population in the ancient China are quite huge. First, let the emperor held a discussion in a beautiful palace with some of the famed scholars around the country, assuming the Confucian scholars/officers were the arch-enemy of the enunchs historically, seeing the great chance to destroy the enemy once and for all would be a great pleasure for them, so the discussion will possibly be successful,then the public opinion would know what's going on, and the enunchs would kept silence. That will take around half a year I think.

So, assuming that the scholars agreed your thought, there would be tooo many people on the vast land of the Middle Country to learn about the policy.You would need effective transportation system to spread your words out, but I think it would be rather easier to be
satisfied, as if vast waterway network and relays could be maintained after a period of chaos. And that would need a year or two.

At last, you will have to ensure your heirs won't trust the eunuchs anymore, as their ancestor do. The eunuchs used to help the emperor to manage the relations between the relatives of the Son of Heaven, which is why they can always have the power to mess things up. You would need some other people to replace them, they need to be considerate, sociable, and have a complicated mind, and I think we could have some kind of female officers to take the job, and make it as a kind of progenitor system, then your sons would obey it wholeheartedly. This kind of reform might take two years or more, as it would remains debatable around the scholars that if having female to take hold of such an important career.

So, all in all, it might take around five years to get rid of eunuchs in the Imperial Court, and later in the Chinese society which centered by the the Son of Heaven.
 
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