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Operation Nemesis and Other Historic Paybacks

Khalid Elhassan November 17, 2019 32 min

Armenian Genocide - 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide

4. Poisoning Oneself In Pursuit of Immortality

One of the charlatans who flocked to Shi Huangdi’s court gave the emperor daily mercury pills. He claimed that they were a life-prolonging intermediate step in his research for immortality drugs, which should tidy Shi Huangdi over until the Life Elixir was ready.

Swallowing mercury every day, the emperor gradually poisoned himself, and gradually grew insane. He turned into a recluse who concealed himself from all but his closest courtiers, listened constantly to songs about “Pure Beings”, ordered 400 scholars buried alive, burned all history books and had his son and heir banished. Rather than prolong his life, Shi Huangdi shortened it in his pursuit of immortality, and died of mercury poisoning at the relatively young age of 49.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.