Stories
of the poison known as "gu" go back centuries in China. Some of these
tales are laced with black magic and witchcraft, but the more recent
legends are of women who poison traveling men for seduction, robbery, or
revenge. The poison itself is made by combining the venom of various
dangerous creatures in a unique way.
There are several
methods for formulating the perfect gu poison, according to Xu Chunfu,
an official in the imperial medical bureau, who wrote about gu in 1556.
The most well-known recipe is to gather different kinds of the “five
poisonous creatures” and place them in a jar to fight. This done on the
day of the Dragon Boat Festival, which is the fifth day of the fifth
lunar month. Some say that the jar is kept in darkness for up to the
year. The body of the remaining venomous creature, which has eaten the
others in the jar, will become the source of the lethal poison.
The
idea is that the last creature will have incorporated all the different
poisonous compounds in his own body. But the scary tales of gu were
used to marginalize the Miao and Lingnan people of southern China. The
dominant Han folk told tales of Miao and Lingnan women who were a danger
to travelers from northern China because they had gu and were willing
to use it. Read
the history of the poison that never really existed at Atlas Obscura.
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