Which Chinese emperor drank mercury?

Posted by Keshav Jain on



Today mercury is handled with much care and never seen much except inside thermometers and labs. But in the early times, the Greeks, the Persians and the Chinese valued it much. Mercury was actually thought to offer immortality. The biggest victim of this misconception was Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang who took some special mercury pills for immortality which instead had the opposite effect on him!



By the time he died at the age of 49, presumably through mercury poisoning, Qin Shi Huang had all but completed his colossal underground tomb. If he were unable to rule forever in waking life, then he would be emperor until the end of time in the afterlife.



The scale of the Chinese emperor’s mausoleum, the size of a great ancient city, remains breathtaking, its core a pyramid that once rose to 100m (328ft). Less than half this height today and long greened by vegetation the pyramid remains clearly visible. In terms of Chinese tradition, it forms the eye of a propitious landscape that can be read as a dragon.



 



Picture Credit : Google


Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

No comments

Add Comment

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.
To leave a comment you must approve it via e-mail, which will be sent to your address after submission.