Ge Hong

Chinese Daoist alchemist whose herbal pharmacology worked and whose immortality elixirs killed at least three emperors.

Ge Hong's Baopuzi ("Master Embracing Simplicity") is two books in one. The "outer chapters" are Confucian political philosophy. The "inner chapters" mix two threads: a serious herbal pharmacopoeia — including a malaria treatment using Artemisia annua that Tu Youyou would re-derive in the 1970s and win a Nobel for — and recipes for cinnabar-based elixirs of immortality, which contain mercuric sulfide. Several Tang emperors took them and died. The herbs were medicine. The cinnabar was poison sold as transcendence.