Legacy Forever

A few years ago I was watching a documentary on Qin Shi Huang ....

 

Who Wants To Live Forever?

 

......the first Emperor of China and his increasingly bizarre and desperate attempts to stave of the inevitable fate that gets us all, whether divine royal demi-god or foot in the mud peasant mortals, death. 

 

These involved sending sage's across the globe looking for the elixir of life, or the fountain of youth. He even started eating mercury balls laced with gold devised by his doctors as the best way to keep him (and them) alive ….

This was a form of sympathetic magic. Gold was known to be eternal and immutable, while mercury was considered to be the same, so a bit of both must pass on these properties if ingested, or at least that was the theory. Especially as the cost was such that only an emperor or a god could afford the treatments.

Needless to say, it didn’t work … he’s dead, probably poisoned by the mercury he had been ingesting. In fact he may well be very well preserved for much the same reasons …. The mercury would have killed the bugs that normally eat a body after death.

So perhaps it’s no surprise to learn that the nearest equivalent to this demi-god status left in Asia (after Emperor Hirohito finally gave up the claim), the Kim dynasty of North Korea, had a similar aim. The founding father of the divine dynasty Kim Il-Sung, became a picky eater and had all his rice grains individually selected (shades of ‘peel me a grape Beulah’) …. But more importantly he created a health institute, whose sole purpose, was to devise ways of prolonging his life.

Needless to say again, it didn’t work … he’s dead but worshipped, however there is no reason to think that the institute has closed, and no doubt even now, several Fu-Manchu’s are literally slaving away to find a cure for death, for the Kim-Il’s.

Fu Manchu's Seeking Cure For Death

Strangely, there is another link between the first emperor and Dictator Kim-Il Sung, which is that after his death Emperor Qin Shi Huang was laid into a tomb that only the Egyptians in their pomp are likely to have matched. It has not been excavated, but is believed to be both intact, and extremely toxic, because he had flowing rivers of mercury representing the rivers of his kingdom in the tomb, these will have stopped flowing after 2,000 years, but the fumes have built up, and mercury can be detected on the surface. However he also had the terracotta warriors stand guard on his underground kingdom … but a distinct lack of current worship.

Qin Shi Huangs Tomb

Equally, Kim-Il Sung is laid to rest in a giant mausoleum, which while admittedly not a patch on the grandeur of the Chinese Emperors tomb, is still a very big building. However, where Kim-Il Sung loses out on Gold, Diamonds, and the no doubt splendid artefacts stakes, he does make up for it on the guards divisions. He has a massive, devoted and fanatical army protecting his tomb, and to cap it all he has descendants with nuclear bombs.

Kim-il Sung's Tomb

There can be a strange synchronicity around some forms of rule, especially dictatorships, after all there are only so many ways in which:

• You can be worshipped as a demi-god,
• Try to stave off the inevitable death (in fact if you can survive to a natural death you have done well), 

and finally if you make to a normal death,

• Protect your legacy (and body parts) from destruction after death.

So perhaps its no surprise that the attempted methods to handle them are always so similar ....