Mary Anderson, author of Hidden Power The Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China, notes that eunuchs' inability to seduce the concubines was a key reason why emperors wanted eunuchs to serve them, because irrefutable paternity was crucial for ancestor worship among the emperors. It was also partly because it had always been like that—having eunuchs was an imperial privilege and a very old tradition. "As long as there had been courts, there were eunuchs,”said Liu Yueping, curator of the Tian Yi Eunuch Museum in Beijing. Confucius philosophy encouraged tradition to be followed.
