"Swallowing gold" is not only a kind of punishment in ancient times, but also one of the common ways for ancient people to commit suicide, but swallowing gold and dying actually has little to do with gold.
Swallowing gold, as the name suggests, is to swallow gold, to put it bluntly, it is to eat gold into the stomach, although it sounds a little incredible, but in ancient times many people did this.
Generally speaking, most of those who swallow gold want to commit suicide because they make mistakes, so they do not endure the pain of hanging themselves and drinking poison, so they adopt the relatively decent method of swallowing gold.
But in fact, after the ancients swallowed gold, the main culprit of its death had nothing to do with the gold itself.
First of all, it is not necessarily all gold that is swallowed
In many costume film and television dramas or literary works with ancient themes, it is not uncommon to see the plot of swallowing gold and committing suicide, for example, in the sixty-ninth episode of Dream of Red Mansions, Second Sister You staged a "suicide by swallowing gold".
Second Sister You thought to herself: "I often hear people say that you can fall to death if you give birth to gold, isn't it cleaner than hanging yourself." After thinking about it, I opened the box, found a piece of raw gold, and swallowed it in my mouth with tears.... When she came in to see, she saw that she was neatly dressed and had died on the kang. --- "Dream of Red Mansions"
In addition, there are also some costume TV series, and there are many similar plots.
For example, in a certain Qing Palace TV series that was once on the air, a maid named Qinglian also used the method of swallowing gold to die and ending her life, and her thoughts before dying were similar to Second Sister You, thinking that swallowing gold was cleaner than hanging herself and drinking poison.
But in fact, swallowing gold and dying is not as silent and painless as they imagined.
Before we explain this question, let's take a look at what ancient gold looked like, and also, what is the difference between ancient gold and modern gold.
Ancient gold is just a name, not high-purity gold as modern people think, from a certain point of view, but anything that is shiny and yellow can usually be called "gold".
So, what is it that is both shiny and yellow? The answer is copper.
This means that for a long time in ancient times, copper was also a kind of gold, so when we look through some historical materials, we will see that a certain emperor rewarded his ministers with a large amount of gold.
For example, after Wei Qing defeated the Xiongnu, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty was happy and gave Wei Qing 200,000 catties of gold; for example, in the early Tang Dynasty, Li Shimin won a battle, and after he returned, Li Yuan directly rewarded him with nearly 10,000 catties of gold.
Think about it, how could there be such a large reserve of gold in ancient times? Therefore, through the research of historians, it is concluded that copper was also a type of gold for a long time in ancient times.
That is to say, the so-called swallowing of gold and death by the ancients may actually be swallowing copper.
As we all know, although copper is one of the essential trace elements in the human body, if excessive intake of copper, it will still cause copper poisoning, and then lead to acute kidney failure, and the final result is death.
According to modern medical research, once the human body ingests more than 10g of copper, it will cause death, and the ancients must have swallowed much more than 10g in order to seek death, so death is inevitable.
In addition, the underdeveloped gold refining technology in ancient times is also one of the reasons for the death of gold swallowing.
Once in the summer of one year, a very high-end ice drink was very popular, this drink is characterized by golden light, it is gold leaf ice cream.
The so-called gold leaf ice cream is a layer of gold packaging made of gold on the surface of traditional ice cream, but this packaging can be eaten.
In addition to gold leaf ice cream, there are many similar gold foods, such as the golden steak of France and the golden fish jelly of Japan, and the unifying characteristic of these foods is that gold is eaten as food.
Regardless of whether it is nutritious to eat gold in the stomach, but in terms of appearance, the golden ice cream can definitely give people a "regal style" pleasure.
So, the question is, will it be poisoned if you eat it? The answer is no.
According to the research of relevant personnel, it was found that if a mouse ingested more than 3.6 grams of gold per day, it would take a long time to cause the death of the mouse.
If this amount is converted to the human body, it is equivalent to an adult of about 60 kilograms, who needs to ingest about 216 gold per day, and it is a long-term ingestion before it causes its death.
216 grams of gold, according to the current price of gold, is a lot of money.
So why did ancient people die after swallowing gold, because they ate it, in addition to the copper mentioned above, there are some other strange things.
Modern gold, through the continuous improvement of the purification process and the assistance of various advanced equipment, has been able to reach a high degree of purity, and even the purity reaches 99%, which is not a difficult task.
But in ancient times, the purification process was not as advanced as it is now.
Taking the Tongzhi Emperor of the Qing Dynasty as an example, during his reign, the annual output of gold at that time was 50 to 80 tons, but according to historical records, the purity of gold at that time was only about 73%.
In other words, more than half of the one or two pieces of gold are indeed gold, but the rest is some other impurities.
These impurities, including mercury, lead, cadmium, etc., and if these things are eaten, they will invariably cause one consequence, that is, heavy metal poisoning.
That is to say, like the second sister You mentioned above, the gold she swallowed was actually a piece of "poisoned gold", and the reason why the maid saw that she had been dead for a long time was actually because of heavy metal poisoning.
Therefore, in ancient times, swallowing gold and dying, in a sense, was poisoning.
Also, the additional damage caused by swallowing gold is also easy to kill
As mentioned above, the reason why "golden food" such as gold leaf ice cream does not poison people and die is not only related to gold purification technology, but also related to its shape and volume.
Gold is an extremely malleable and malleable item, and it is precisely because of this characteristic that it appears in various food products, such as gold leaf on ice cream.
This layer of gold leaf may seem like a large area, but in reality, very little gold is used, and one gram of gold can create about 0.5 square meters of pure gold leaf, while its thickness is only 0.12 microns, and if cut onto a piece of ice cream, then it contains even less.
At the same time, gold is also an inert metal, after it is ingested by the human body, it will not be melted by stomach acid and gastric juice, but will be excreted with the human body, and finally excreted from the body, so even if you eat gold leaf ice cream, what is finally absorbed by the human body is only the ice cream itself.
However, it should be noted that the gold on the gold leaf ice cream is very small, even less than 0.1 grams, but the ancients swallowed gold, and they ate large pieces of gold such as gold nuggets, gold rings or gold earrings.
Even if the gold they eat is of high purity and will not be poisoned, it will cause frictional damage to the esophagus and gastrointestinal tract because of these gold products of different shapes, especially if they are forcibly swallowed.
This is like a person who eats hard objects, such as iron nails, glass, etc., and forcibly swallows them, which can easily cut the esophagus and gastrointestinal tract, or damage other internal organs.
Once this happens, it can cause severe pain, which can lead to massive bleeding and eventually death.
Even if it does not cause scratches to internal organs, or the scratches are not fatal, it will cause blockage of the digestive tract due to ingestion of foreign bodies, and over time, the digestive tract will be distended, resulting in intestinal incision obstruction, and thus death.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, there was a general named Shoushan, when the city was broken, because he did not want to fall into the hands of the enemy, he swallowed gold and died, it is said that he swallowed two or three gold rings, but after swallowing, he did not die immediately, but was very painful, in order to liberate, he was shot twice again, and then ended his life.
There is also the second sister You mentioned above, after turning out the gold nuggets, she put them in her mouth with tears, and after "stiffening her neck" a few times, she swallowed it, you can imagine how painful it was at that time.
It's still swallowed, and if the gold nugget is too big and accidentally gets stuck in the throat, the discomfort is really unimaginable.
Therefore, it is not so much that the ancients "swallowed gold and died", but that the ancients died because of the additional damage caused by swallowing gold, after all, gold was meant to be worn on the body, not swallowed in the stomach.
But because the ancients didn't know much about these, in addition to swallowing gold and dying, there are many ways of death related to "gold".
One of the most famous is the "Golden Juice".
In many historical materials, there will be descriptions of soldiers who dipped the arrows of their bows and arrows in "gold juice" when they were fighting, and the arrows stained with "gold juice" would cause greater damage to the enemy.
But this "gold juice" has nothing to do with gold.
So what exactly is "golden juice"? In fact, to put it simply, it is dung boiled in water, and the reason why it will cause more damage is because it is stained with "golden juice" prisoner arrows, which will form an infection on the enemy.
Once infected, according to ancient medical conditions, it is almost a dead end.