Yeah, except for the fact that castration was still a punishment. More than 2100 years ago China's first great historian, Sima Qian, had his man parts cut off and he was forced to serve as a eunuch under Emperor Wu of Han, merely for making a veiled insult that the emperor did not like. Eunuchs did pretty well for themselves, though, as evidenced by their control of the royal court at various stages of the Han, Tang, and Ming dynasties. Even the famed 15th-century Ming-period Muslim Chinese admiral and Indian-Ocean-explorer Zheng He was a eunuch.