Pick your poison

Toxins have been used in China for millennia, some with such chilling names as 'intestine-rupturing herb' and 'three-laugh death powder'. Zhu Weijing reports.

If you want someone dead but don't want to get caught, poison is the way to go. Or, maybe you just want someone to die painfully and slowly. Again, poison is the way to go. The world recently watched King Joffrey Baratheon's death from a poison known as The Strangler on HBO's Game of Thrones. China has long had its own legendary poisons to dish out. A chapter on poisoning in the Song Dynasty (960-1279) book Instructions to Coroners by Song Ci, the founding father of forensic science in China, begins: "For those who die of poisoning, their orifices open, their face turns greenish black or green, their lips go purplish green, their nails appear dark green, and blood spews out of their mouth, eyes, ears, and nose." A grim fate indeed.

The ancient Chinese excelled in the discovery, use and cure of poisons - some familiar to us today and some with chilling names, including lethal poisons such as arsenic, "intestine-rupturing herb", "crane's red crown" and "three-laugh death powder".