Today, the longest-lived elderly person in China and the world is named Alimihan Seyti, an old grandmother living in the Uyghur Autonomous Region, who was born in the 12th year of Guangxu (that is, 1886 AD) and is now 133 years old.
But when it comes to true longevity, in addition to the mythical figures such as Peng Zu and Lü Dongbin, the old man who lives the longest in China in the general concept should be an old man named Li Qingyuan, who was born in the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty, died in the Republic of China era, and lived to the age of 256.
Li Qingyuan, also known as Li Qingyun,) was born in The sixteenth year of the Kangxi Dynasty, that is, in 1677 AD, in Sichuan (also known as Yunnan). On the one hand, he was proficient in herbal medicine and was a master of Traditional Chinese medicine; on the other hand, he practiced Qigong since childhood. The combination of the two makes him healthy and has become the secret of maintaining a long life.
According to records, Li Qingyuan married a total of 24 wives, and because he was too long-lived, he had no choice but to send each wife, including his descendants. He had a total of 180 descendants, a total of 10 generations, but he could only watch his descendants die one after another, and suffered the blow of the white-haired people sending the black-haired people.
In 1927, in order to consult the secret of longevity, Yang Sen, a Kuomintang officer, went to Sichuan to visit Li Qingyuan, and specially formulated new clothes for him, taking photos and publishing them in newspapers. This photo is also real, and the title is "Portrait of Li Qingyun, a 250-year-old man in Kaixian County, taken in Wanzhou in the spring of the sixteenth year of the Republic of China."
Three years later, in 1931, the Wanzhou Daily once again published the news of the elderly Li Qingyuan: "Li Qingyun, a two-hundred-and-fifty-three-year-old man in Kaixian County, has gone from Chen Jiachang to Wan the night before to live in the Li Family Garden. The old man was invited to Wan at the invitation of Master Wang..." It can be seen from this that Li Qingyuan is a real person.
But along with the name of Li Qingyuan's longevity, the doubts about him have not dissipated, has Li Qingyuan really lived for so long? Putting aside some of the medical points of view, after all, we are not professional medical students, we can only analyze from the historical records, we can find that Li Qingyuan's age, there are really some doubts.
The first evidence is the Feast of a Thousand Sorrows. Both Kangxi and Qianlong held two feasts of a thousand monks, namely the fifty-second year of Kangxi, the sixty-first year of Kangxi, the fifty years of Qianlong, and the sixty years of Qianlong. Li Qingyuan could not catch up with the two thousand feasts during the Kangxi period, after all, the age was not enough, and the two banquets during the Qianlong period, Li Qingyuan was 108 years old and 118 years old, respectively, was absolutely enough to get the age of the thousand feasts; but looking at the list of these two thousand feasts, Li Qingyuan's name did not appear once.
Then there is the historical record. Such a long-lived old man as Li Qingyuan, the local county records will certainly have some records, but Li Qingyuan's record has never been, he seems to be a long-lived old man who came out after Yang Sen published the newspaper. This makes people wonder whether Li Qingyuan is really long-lived, or is he just a story made up by the warlords?
Another point is that when Li Qingyuan was 200 years old, he also went to colleges and universities many times to teach health care. So the problem is, the earliest university in China is the predecessor of Peking University, Beijing Normal University, which is the first national university in modern China, which opened in 1912. How old is Li Qingyuan at this time? 235 years old, the age does not match at all.
This puts aside the 3 doubts of the medical concept, which is enough to make people doubt the authenticity of Li Qingyuan's longevity. However, suspicion is doubt, when there is no evidence, no one can say whether Li Qingyuan is a super long-lived old man who has lived for 10 generations (counting the Republic of China), and I hope that there are more historical materials to prove this.