Here are some of the soldiers of the famed terracotta army, constructed on the demand of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, as part of a grand mausoleum dedicated to himself.
Qin Shi Huang was known for many achievements — standardizing weights across his lands, unifying China, beginning new construction of the Great Wall, etc. He was famous for less noble acts as well, such as punishing Confucian scholars, burning their books and even (according to _Records of the Grand Historian_) burying alive some 460 Confucian scholars who kept ahold of the forbidden manuscripts.
One of the Emperor’s fixations was his own death — he survived multiple assassination attempts and had such a fear of his own extinction that he quested for an “elixir of life” that would grant him immortality. He hired alchemists and demanded they come up with the formula. They gave him their concoctions, which included mercury, long considered an element with mystical properties. Ultimately, Qin Shi Huang likely died from the metal poisoning at age 49 in 210 BCE.
The written records that narrate the first Emperor’s death were largely composed by Confucian scholars, and they had every reason to poison their stories of Qin Shi Huang’s fate.
