Chinese alchemy: the search for immortality with cinnabar

The Diary's earlier articles follow a single line, the one that runs from Greece to Europe. And the one on The Kybalion told of a 1908 book that said China, India and Japan had taken their doctrine from Egypt. This article is the first from another tradition, with its own texts in Chinese, written between the 2nd and 4th centuries, and its own words: Chinese alchemy. I read Ge Hong's texts in the original and the scholarly studies through sources in English; what I could not read, I say.

A note before going on. Mercury and its vapours are toxic: WHO counts it among the ten chemicals of major public health concern, and it can harm the nervous, digestive and immune systems, and the lungs, kidneys, skin and eyes.¹ This article tells the history of chemistry. Do not repeat anything that is described.

Ge Hong and his book

Ge Hong (283–343) lived in China under the Jin dynasty, a turbulent age. He finished the Baopuzi (抱朴子, "The Master Who Embraces Simplicity") around 317–318 and revised it later, around 330. It has 70 chapters: 20 "inner" ones (Neipian), on immortality, alchemy and medicines, and 50 "outer" ones (Waipian), on politics, society and literature. Chapters 4, 8, 11 and 16 deal with "external", laboratory alchemy. Joseph Needham called him "the greatest alchemist in Chinese history".²

In his autobiography he portrays himself without ornament: coarse in character, dull and stammering, ugly in appearance, with his hat and shoes dirty and worn. His neighbours called him "the man who embraces simplicity", and from that he took the name of his book.²

The cinnabar sentence

Chapter 4 is titled "金丹", the "golden elixir". There Ge Hong writes the sentence he is best remembered for:³

凡草木燒之即燼，而丹砂燒之成水銀，積變又還成丹砂，其去凡草木亦遠矣。故能令人長生。 — Fán cǎomù shāo zhī jí jìn, ér dānshā shāo zhī chéng shuǐyín, jī biàn yòu huán chéng dānshā.

"Plants and trees, when burned, turn to ash; cinnabar, when burned, turns into mercury, and by accumulated changes becomes cinnabar again. It is far from ordinary plants. That is why it can make people live a long time."

His reasoning is this: what is consumed and disappears cannot give duration; what changes and becomes again what it was, can. And he himself notes his contemporaries' objection: people do not know that mercury comes from cinnabar, and when told they do not believe it: "cinnabar is a red thing; where would it get this white thing from?"³

Today what happens is understood. Cinnabar is mercury sulphide: heated in air, the sulphur leaves as a gas and the mercury remains; and if mercury is brought together with sulphur, it gives cinnabar again. That is what the block below counts with atomic weights.⁴

The sum comes out to the gram: with 100 g of cinnabar, 86.2 g of mercury come out, and to have 100 g of cinnabar again you need 13.8 g of sulphur. That "what comes out is what went in" is what seemed to Ge Hong to prove that this was different from plants. What he could not know is what mercury vapour does in a body.

The medicines of the immortals

In chapter 11, "仙藥", Ge Hong ranks the medicines of the immortals: "Of the medicines of the immortals, the best is cinnabar; next gold; next silver; next the various zhi fungi; next the five jades; next mica…".⁵ Mercury and gold were not strange things: for him they were the top of the list.

Chapter 16, "黃白", is about the "yellow and the white", that is, gold and silver: it says the classics of the immortals contain 25 scrolls of "yellow and white" recipes, over a thousand entries. It argues that transformation is natural: "change is the natural way of heaven and earth; why doubt that gold and silver can be made from other things?" And it gives an example: lead is white and can be made red like a dan; dan is red and can be made white like lead.⁶

And here is a confession one does not expect from a master: he says he never managed to do it because he was poor and could not get the materials, and that saying "I know how to make gold and silver" while going hungry and cold is like selling a remedy for the lame while unable to walk: "no one will believe it".⁶

From the laboratory to the body

"External" alchemy (waidan, 外丹) prepares elixirs by heating minerals and metals in a sealed crucible. It arose in the early Han dynasty, gained popularity until the Tang (618–907) and declined until the Ming.⁷ Its two main methods came to be refining cinnabar into mercury and combining lead with mercury.⁷

And it had a cost. The Tang emperors patronised alchemy with enthusiasm, and elixir poisoning caused the death of Emperors Wuzong (r. 840–846) and Xuanzong (r. 846–859), and probably also of Xianzong (r. 805–820) and Muzong (r. 820–824). Scholars caution that the shift towards another alchemy was a longer and more complex process than those deaths.⁷ Sources disagree on the count: a Chinese press piece from 2008 speaks of at least five emperors killed by elixirs, the same ones plus Taizong, while another view holds that Taizong's death is only a conjecture, since the official chronicles speak of a long illness.¹² Centuries later the Jiajing Emperor of the Ming dynasty died, according to Wikipedia, of a lethal dose of mercury in an "elixir of life".⁸

That other alchemy is "internal" (neidan, 內丹): instead of taking an elixir, one seeks to make it inside one's own body. The body becomes a cauldron in which the three treasures are "cultivated": essence (jing), breath (qi) and spirit (shen), with meditation, gymnastics and other practices.⁹ Its texts borrow the vocabulary of external alchemy. One of the oldest books, the Zhouyi cantong qi, is attributed to Wei Boyang, around the mid-2nd century, and is considered the oldest book on alchemy in China. It deals with three things at once: the cosmology of the Book of Changes, Taoism and alchemy.¹⁰

Gunpowder, an accident of the elixir

Gunpowder was born of the alchemists. The first sure reference, in China, is from the 9th century, in the Tang dynasty: a formula in the Taishang shengzu jindan mijue, of the year 808, with six parts sulphur, six of saltpetre and one of an herb, birthwort. About fifty years later a Taoist text, the Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe, warns: "some have heated sulphur, realgar and saltpetre together with honey; smoke and flames result, so that their hands and faces have been burnt, and even the whole house where they were working burned down".¹¹

That is why gunpowder is thought to have been an accidental by-product of the search for the elixir of life. Its Chinese name, huoyao (火藥), means "fire medicine". The earliest known chemical formula of gunpowder is from the 11th century, in a military treatise, the Wujing zongyao, written between 1040 and 1044.¹¹

A tradition with its own words

The word dan (丹), which gives the elixir its name, sums up the tradition. Fabrizio Pregadio, one of its leading specialists, lists four accepted meanings: the colour cinnabar or scarlet, the mineral cinnabar, sincerity, and an essence obtained by refining a substance, the "medicine" of those who seek immortality. And he concludes that they all come from a sense of "essence", with the idea of the authentic, the simple and the concentrated.⁷

And no one knows when it began. Nathan Sivin proposes an approximate chronology: belief in the possibility of physical immortality begins around the 8th century BCE; the idea that it is achieved by taking herbs, in the 4th century BCE; and that immortality remedies can be made by alchemy, and not only found in nature, no later than the 2nd century BCE.⁷ It is a tradition with its own history, its own texts and its own questions. There is no need to make it come from Egypt or anywhere else to explain it.

What we do with this

This article rests on Ge Hong's Chinese text, read in the original, and on studies in English. What is missing is the most important thing: what has been published in Chinese, in journals and books there, and the sources this server cannot reach. For that this Diary needs help, from anyone who reads Chinese and wants to correct us or add sources.

Anima Mundis does not promise a longer life and cures nothing. What it can count, at the Observatory, is how many times someone said how they were and at what UTC hour. It is a far more modest count than Ge Hong's, and it can be checked.