Drink mercury to become immortal
Sometimes I wish I was born in the times of kings. I wish I were a king. So much power, such amazing people and battle fields, each day would have been an adventure.
I wish I was not born in the time of Genghis Khan -_-.
Do you know who built the great wall of China?
Or do you know how long it is?
Or do you know what great wall of china even is?
It’s a wall, ofcourse. Streched over more than 21,000kms 😲, it is an ancient wall developed over the last thousands of years, even before the birth of christ. A defensive wall against the nomadic tribes built by Chinese ancient civilisations to save themselves from invading forces. It’s length is marvelous, its locations are epic, passing through deserts, mountains and various terrains. It’s a piece of f*ing beauty. That’s not it, it has over 25,000 watch towers along its complete length, forming a strong, invincible and unpenetrable line of defense created by the ancient chinese armies over the centuries.
It’s history though is not as beautiful as the monument itself. Filled with blood, despair, starvation, madness, and death.
The great wall was not actually built by a single king or by one single civilization. What we call China today was once divided into 7 independent states. It was the first emperor of China, formerly the king of one of these states who conquered the rest 6 of them and united all of them to form China. Qin Shi Huang Di was his name. No, he wasn’t a hero or a godly man. He was a conquest and killing machine. He was the one who first started the construction of wall after conquering all the 7 kingdoms. The wall was then built in pieces by following civilizations like Han and Ming. But that is not our topic of discussion today. Our topic is the immortality of the king.
Qin Shi Huang Di, the conquest machine was supposed to be the most powerful man on earth at that time. Killing machine that killed his own baby cousins, tens of thousands of captives of wars, exiled his own prime-minister and mother from the kingdom had nothing left to achieve. He already had everything he could dream of. His next project, immortality.
He sent his troops and most trusted ministers on expeditions to find witches and magic men who could make him immortal. Apart from the popular belief that sex with multiple partners leads to a longer life time(damn, I wish I was born in ancient China), his ministers came up with a magical element. Mercury!
This element was consider magical because it could dissolve the most amazing of elements in it, gold. It was considered to be divine and magical because of its silvery reflective appearance as well. Qin Shi Huang Di started taking mercury to become immortal. See the ingenuity of the emperor and his minister. Human body cannot abosrb liquid mercury, it passes right through the body without being absorbed, so he started taking it in solid form made from a soluble solution. He is sure that immortality is finally his now.
Irony is mercury actually is highly poisonous. High intakes of mercury directly attacks the nervous system causing mental stress, headaches, nausea, paranoia, and ultimately nervous breakdown. The immortal king took it for years in a stretch before he actually turned to a mad dog and was suppossed to have constant paranoia. He had dreams and visions that all the people he had killed were actually going to haunt him in the form of spirits once he dies. He was more afraid of dying than ever. But, but. but. He is the king of China. He is not an idiot. He already had all of that arranged. He created the terracotta army.
These life sized sculptures of chinese soldiers were created in numbers of 1000s and were placed a mile away from the burial place of the emporer. They were supposed to guard the dead emporer’s spirit against the vengeful spirits of his dead enemies when they come to disturb the king in his resting place. Kings can be fools. Apart from this, he had thousands of stone armors buried around the pyramid of his grave for those soldiers whose bodies were so tormented in war that they couldn’t recieve a proper funeral. The king eventually died ofcourse. All his devoties, builders and people who knew about how to enter his burial tomb were trapped and left in that tomb forever to bury all the secrets of the tomb. This trapping was planned and not a sudden action. The legend says that his tomb has all the things that a king might need for an afterlife along with rivers of liquid mercury flowing around his resting place forming the complete map of his Chinese kingdom.
The tomb is at the bottom of that mountain. Chinese archeologists have never been able to excavate it, and its still intact. The soil samples around it though have shown unexpectedly high amounts of mercury pointing to the fact that the rivers of mercury might actually be true. It’s shocking and difficult for even a king to demand that high amount of mercury.
Imagine drinking molten metal for immortality but dying instead……
Power can drive people crazy. I wish the first emperor had contented himself with sex with multiple partners for a longer life, then he would have had an eventful and healthy old age. Opportunity missed.
Rajat Upadhyay
You are someone else
I’m still right here
