1. “Immortality Drugs” Kill Emperor
Qin Shihuangdi (259 – 210 BC), whose name means “First Emperor“, was the first ruler to unify China’s disparate kingdoms into a single empire. One of history’s most capable rulers, he was also one of history’s cruelest despots. In a great karmic plot twist, Qin Shihuangdi wanted to live forever and pursued a “Life Elixir” to that end, but instead of prolonging his life, the quest for immortality ended up killing him. To live forever, China’s First Emperor sought the advice of philosophers, alchemists, opportunists, sketchy characters, and outright charlatans. One of the charlatans gave him mercury pills, which he claimed were a life-prolonging intermediate step in his research for immortality drugs. Using them every day should tidy Qin Shihuangdi over until the Life Elixir was ready. However, ingesting mercury every day gave the emperor a nasty dose of mercury poisoning, and drove him insane.
He became a recluse, and spent his days listening to songs about “Pure Beings”. During this period, he did many bizarre things, such as ordering the live burial of hundreds of scholars, and had his son and heir banished. Mercury poisoning finally finished Qin Shihuangdi off at the relatively young age of 49. While touring the provinces, he dropped dead inside his huge imperial wagon – a miniature house on wheels – on September 10th, 210 BC. His corpse was discovered by his chief bodyguard, who informed the emperor’s most trusted adviser, Li Ssu. The duo sat on the information until they returned to the capital, and in the meantime, put on a show to pretend that the emperor was still alive and kicking. They sent food and official reports to the wagon and its ripening corpse, whose stench they concealed by placing wagons of rotting fish nearby.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources & Further Reading
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Cracked – 5 Bonkers Supervillain Plans Real Governments Actually Tried
Diamond, Jared – Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)
Encyclopedia Britannica – Great Leap Forward
Guardian, The, December 1st, 2006 – Lawyers Warned Eden That Suez Invasion Was Illegal
History Dot Com – The Grisly Story of America’s Largest Lynching
Kershaw, Ian – Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (2000)
Maniates, Michael, et al – The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice (2010)
Mob Museum – Prohibition Profits Transformed the Mob
Vice, April 26th, 2013 – The Soviet Scientist Who Dreamed of Melting the Arctic With a 55 Mile Dam
New York Times, May 21st, 1993 – Orphans of the 1950s, Telling of Abuse, Sue Quebec
Rabbit Free Australia – The Rabbit Problem
Radzinsky, Edvard – The Rasputin File (2000)
Yorkshire Post, November 30th, 2016 – How the Suez Crisis Sank the British Empire