In 166, envoys of An-dun (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus), king of Da Qin (Rome), probably Romanized Greek or Arab merchants from a Red Sea port, arrived in the capital Luoyang to meet the Han emperor – the first direct contact. There had been several moments in the previous century when Romans and Han were close: when Trajan was in Ctesiphon he was only a few hundred miles from the garrisons of Ban Yao, son of Protector-General Ban Chao. Roman coins have been found in China and Vietnam but especially in India, suggesting that most of the trade took place there. Bearing presents of ivory, rhino and tortoiseshell and an essay on astronomy, Marcus’ envoys were probably supposed to discuss direct silk trade, cutting out the Parthians. But they arrived just in time for high drama in Luoyang: Emperor Huan, thirty-four years old, took control of his kingdom from overmighty courtiers – with the help of trusted eunuchs.
In China, candidates for the knife were sometimes castrated by their families to prepare them for service at court, but others presented themselves outside the court. Having been asked thrice, ‘Will you regret it or not?’, they were anaesthetized with opium and held down for the operation – in China they were not just castrated but emasculated, losing not only testicles but penises. The wound took a hundred days to heal. Survival rates are just guesswork, but somewhere between 90 per cent and two-thirds died from an infection. If they survived as ‘un-men’, they applied to the Inner Court. For their services in helping emperors crush overmighty ministers, they were given titles and allowed to adopt heirs to whom they could leave riches and honours. Yet un-men were hated for their differentness – they often remained tiny, their voices were high, and they were partly incontinent, urinating through quills they kept in their hair – hence their nickname Urine-Sacks.
Huandi failed to control his powerful eunuchs, who framed his empress and had her and her entire clan executed for witchcraft. When Huandi died in 168, the eighteen-year-old Dowager Empress Dou appointed her father Dou Wu as regent. The dowager decided to kill the late emperor’s nine favourite concubines, but the eunuchs let her kill only one of them. The throne was vacant until the regent found a Han princeling in the provinces who was enthroned in the capital at the age of eleven as Emperor Ling. But the chief tutor, head of the civil service, Chen Fan, persuaded the regent to purge the eunuchs. Seventeen un-men gathered in secret and ‘smeared blood on their mouths’ in a pact praying to August Heaven to help them annihilate the Dou family. The eunuchs seized the dowager empress and surrounded the regent. Dou killed himself, his family was annihilated, the chief tutor was trampled to death by irate un-men. The castrated potentates, the ten so-called central regular attendants, now ruled China – but an anti-eunuch backlash was coming.
Marcus Aurelius’ envoys were probably in Luoyang for the triumph of the eunuchs, but it is not known if they made it home. Lucius’ successes against Parthia must have yielded a bounty of prizes, but that was not all he brought back.
A pandemic had hit China in waves between 151 and 161. The world was much more global than one might expect; the disease was reported among Roman soldiers at Lucius’ siege of Ctesiphon and it returned with them. Lucius and Marcus celebrated Parthian triumphs, but soon afterwards a plague ripped through the empire. Marcus understood in a very modern way that the cure and the panic of plague could be ‘far more corrupting’ than the sickness itself. The pandemic, probably a strain of smallpox – incessant killer throughout history – was observed by Marcus’ doctor Galen, a Greek philosopher from Pergamum who had studied medicine in Alexandria. A doctor for gladiators, he became expert at dressing the wounds inflicted on soft flesh by cold steel, understood that the brain was the seat of the soul and realized that blood circulated. Yet he was hopelessly wrong about most things: he believed that health was the result of four humours (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile) and that there were two different circulatory systems: his remained the dominant medical theory for over a thousand years, and doctors were an iatrogenic menace to their patients until the late nineteenth century. Over the next two millennia, whenever you read the words ‘doctors were called’, prepare for death.
