In TV dramas, we often see assassins assassinating the emperor, but the risk of assassination is so great, why not change it, such as poisoning. The emperor may give poisoned wine when he gives his concubines the death penalty, but the assassins really don't poison much, so why not kill the emperor by poisoning the meal? Puyi once said that from childhood to adulthood, I did not eat hot food.
You may say that although there are not many emperors who have been poisoned and killed, there are still some, such as Kangxi and Guangxu. Kangxi was very ill at the time, but the sudden death that day was still a doubt, so some people suspected that he had been poisoned. According to the Records of the Mysteries of the Great Righteousness, Yongzheng said that The Eight Brothers used him to take revenge on Kangxi for adding notoriety to him.
It can be seen that Yongzheng did not deny the use of ginseng soup to poison Kangxi, so Kangxi may have been poisoned, but he was not poisoned while eating. In addition, let's look at Guangxu again, according to the "Secret Record of the Emperor of Rectification of Guangxu", Guangxu rolled around in bed three days before his death, and screamed stomach pain, and his face was black and his tongue was yellow, so some people speculated that emperor Guangxu was poisoned. However, some people say that the Guangxu Emperor was caused by long-term mental repression, so it is impossible to judge the real cause of his death.
It was not until 2008 that a strand of hair left by the Guangxu Emperor was identified as a death from arsenic. Qi Gong, a descendant of the Qing Dynasty, once said that his great-grandfather had personally seen a eunuch take out a bowl from the Cixi Palace, transfer it to you buttermilk, and then hand it to Guangxu, who drank it and died, but he drank yogurt and was not poisoned by eating.
The only one who dared to poison Guangxu was probably Cixi, so why did Cixi think of poisoning the Guangxu Emperor in such a way, instead of directly poisoning the food? Because poisoning in ancient times was not so simple, first of all, the staff of the imperial dining room was very strict in selection, and every three people were supervised by each other in a group, and if something happened, all three people were punished.
In addition, the emperor was dressed in fine clothes, and there were many types and samples of meals, although there was only one person, but it was full of tables. In addition to the emperor and concubines in the palace, it is definitely too late to cook so many dishes at once, so the meals are prepared a day or half a day in advance, and heated on the stove, so the taste of the meals is not so good.
There are still many formalities when eating, because the emperor also considered the matter of poisoning, so he arranged for the eunuch to try it, and after the eunuch tried all the meals, the emperor ate again, and the emperor used silver chopsticks when eating, if it is poisonous, a try will know, which undoubtedly deepens the difficulty of poisoning. Puyi said that from childhood to adulthood, I did not eat hot food.
Puyi recorded in "The First Half of My Life" that he rarely relied on the things in the imperial dining room to fill his hunger, because the meals in the imperial dining room were basically cold when they were delivered, and every time he ate the meals sent by the empress, after the death of the empress, the princess continued to send. It can be seen that most of the other emperors are like this, although it is a delicious dish, but what is delicious after it is cold. People like the empress dowager, who are easy to get, are not poisoned in their meals, which is even more difficult for the Assassins, and the success rate is not as high as that of the Assassins.