Chapter 35 Section 2 Bankrupt and Be an Eunuch

Wei Si, who has the character of a gambler, made this decision that stunned everyone in a much shorter time than others. However, the decision is easy to make, and the implementation of this decision is still difficult. There are three major problems before Wei Si.First of all, purging requires a large sum of surgical fees. The combined expenses for surgery, recuperation, diet, and medicine cost at least twenty taels of silver. This sum is undoubtedly an astronomical figure for his family.Secondly, although the body cleanse surgeons at that time had certain experience, they had no anesthesia and no disinfection, and the mortality rate was very high, especially for adults, the body wash operation had a higher mortality rate.The third point, which is also the most important point, is that you may not be able to become a eunuch even if you clean yourself up.

In the Ming Dynasty, the number of eunuchs set a historical record.At the peak, there were 100,000 people, and until the end of the Ming Dynasty, there were still 70,000 eunuchs staying in the palace.However, such a huge number still cannot meet the job-seeking needs of those who have nowhere to go. In the middle of the Ming Dynasty, there was a large-scale recruitment of eunuchs in the palace. The initial quota was 1,500 people. As a result, more than 20,000 people flocked to sign up, and many of them underwent body purification surgery before the interview.Faced with such a surge of job seekers, the government had no choice but to expand the quota again and again, from 1,500 to 3,000, and then from 3,000 to 4,500, but in the end, there were still more than 10,000 people. lost.There is a special name in the society for those who have not entered the palace after purification - "nameless white".

After each famine, many "nameless whites" would be added to the capital. By the time of Wei Zhongxian, there were still more than 10,000 such "nameless whites" living in the capital.These more than 10,000 people should be more than 10,000 tragedies with similar plots, reflecting the real side of the Ming Dynasty society in which "the monarch is upright, his ministers are good, and the world is upright." There are only two ways out for these people: one is to bathe the eunuchs in the bathing pools attached to the monasteries in the capital.The job can only accommodate a few thousand people.Most of the remaining "nameless whites" only participated in gangs of beggars and eunuchs who begged and robbed.Seeing these effeminate men lying in front of their horses, begging for life, everyone was disgusted, so they had to pinch their noses and pay two dollars to get rid of the trouble.Therefore, beggars have become the profession of most people.The remaining people had no choice but to become thieves or join the underworld, becoming an unstable factor in social security.

Faced with such a dangerous future, Wei Si's decision can be said to be a desperate one, with a success rate of no more than 50%.However, he was born with a boldness in his blood.He talked about moving the family.After all, it succeeded, and the family escaped from the sea of ​​suffering and rose to the middle class or even higher. If it fails, even if Dazhaozhuang loses a prodigal son.Even his separated brother sold one of the family donkeys to finance his tragic adventure. With the advantage of the eunuch village, he quickly found out the way to enter the palace, and got on the line with Eunuch Wu, who was in charge of recruiting eunuchs.Then, with the twenty or so taels of silver that his family cobbled together, he went to Beijing to find a private body scrubber, and cleaned himself up.

When he lay on the door panel specially used for cleansing, and his hands and feet were tightly bound with hemp rope, he might feel a trace of sadness and even a trace of remorse in his heart, and more, it should be The inexplicable resentment and grief for everything around him suddenly appeared, although he lay here voluntarily.This kind of resentment turned into a thick liquid the moment the surgeon raised the butcher's knife, and it has been accumulated in his heart forever since then. After being cast out, a barley stalk was inserted underneath, and Wei Si lay on the kang with his legs crossed for a month.In order to reduce urination, the body washer gave him stinky marijuana water all day long to make him have loose stools, and he pulled it directly into the straw on the kang, and the whole room smelled bad.Wei Si was lucky, the wound was not infected, and passed the dangerous period smoothly.But the news from his family made him more and more worried every day.The Wei family had already sold the house, and the whole family moved into the Earth Temple by the village. However, Eunuch Wu would not accept this little money as a gift at all.

At this stage, the matter has become an investment of the whole family, and we can't just watch it halfway and let him be an "unknown white".Elder brother Wei Zhao had already separated the family, so he sold his only three acres of Susukida and asked his nephew to bring the money. This time Eunuch Wu accepted it, but he never mentioned whether he could enter the palace.Wei Si's wound healed, so he had to settle down in Longhua Temple, where beggars gathered in the capital, and waited for four months. For four months, he had nightmares almost every night.From autumn to winter, he didn't even have any clothes to keep out the cold, so he stayed in the side room of Longhua Temple all day long, not daring to go out.It turned out that those dreams were no longer thought about, and now he is full of regrets.It turned out that even though he didn't have enough to eat, he was still a decent family after all, but now, people are neither human nor ghost.He made a secret decision: If he couldn't enter the palace, he would rather commit suicide than become a beggar.

Using the money from the family to sell their daughter to others as a child bride, Wei Si finally caught up with the last selection of that year on the fourteenth day of the twelfth lunar month in the seventeenth year of Wanli (1589 A.D.).The first three need a person who can empty the bucket. Among all the candidates, he was the oldest at the age of twenty-three. He was tall, tall, and agile, and he became the only candidate among the group of more than twenty people. When the news came, the whole family burned incense and prayed to Buddha.This day became the most important day in the life of Wei Zhongxian and his whole family.His excitement is no less than that of a scholar in that era who was a high school scholar, although he only found a job of emptying toilets.Who would have thought that this day would be solemnly recorded in history later, as the beginning of a huge and ominous event.