Faith in Immortality Drugs Backfired Big Time on This Ruler
In his quest for immortality, Qin Shi Huang solicited the advice and assistance of numerous philosophers, alchemists, opportunists, sketchy characters, and outright charlatans. In a previous entry, we saw how one of them, Xu Fu, snookered the emperor out of a fleet and 6000 virgins. Another charlatan gave the emperor mercury pills, which he claimed were a life-prolonging intermediate step in his research for immortality drugs. The use of such pills every day should tidy the emperor over until the Life Elixir was ready. As he swallowed mercury every day, the emperor gradually poisoned himself, and gradually grew insane. He turned into a recluse who concealed himself, Howard Hughes style, from all but his closest courtiers, and spent much of his time listening to songs about “Pure Beings”.
Many of the First Emperor’s crazier decisions, such as the burial of scholars alive, the burning of books, and the banishment of his son and heir, were probably caused by the mercury pills. Rather than prolong his life, Qin Shi Huang gave himself a nasty dose of mercury poisoning. It drove him insane for starters, and eventually finished him off for good at the relatively young age of forty nine. It happened on one of his tours of the provinces, when he dropped dead inside his spacious imperial carriage – a miniature house on wheels – on September 10th, 210 BC.