How to kill the emperor without being easily found? Many people will say "poisoning". It is true that many palace dramas have poisoning plots. However, in real history, it is more difficult to poison the emperor than to ascend to heaven. The reason is that the chef has many rules and a clear division of labor.
We all know that the emperor's meals are very particular and varied. There are four meals a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and afternoon snacks. This virtually provides many opportunities for poisoning. In addition, the staff of the royal chef are numerous and miscellaneous. During the reign of Zhu Yuanzhang in the Ming Dynasty, there were more than 5,000 chefs in the Imperial Chef. How can such a complicated person ensure the safety of the emperor's diet?
The Imperial Kitchen does this:
The first step is to design the menu and related chefs in advance.
Every day, the emperor designed the dishes and nutrition in advance, put all the dishes, fruits, staple foods and snacks on the dining table in a unified way, and marked the names of the dishes and chefs on the side with paper, so as to quickly trace the relevant personnel afterwards, which had a good effect on shocking the chef.
Step 2: For each imperial meal, leave a sample in the imperial dining room for inspection.
The third step is to test the poison with silverware.
As we all know, silverware will react with toxic substances to produce black silver sulfide, so it is intuitive and effective to detect poison with silverware. Therefore, before the emperor eats, a small silver sign will be hung next to it to test the safety of food. After careful examination, the emperor will begin to eat.
Step four, there is a special person to taste the food.
After all, not all poisons can blacken silverware, so before the emperor begins to eat, a special eunuch or queen is needed to taste the dishes. Many historical dramas in ancient costume have such a plot.
Step five, the emperor dined.
This is the last and most crucial step. After the first four steps, the probability of emperor poisoning has been greatly reduced. As the ninth five-year plan emperor, his tableware was mainly made of gold and silver, which not only showed nobility and ostentation, but also played a more important role, that is, testing poison. Even if some dishes are porcelain, a silver medal will be placed next to them for testing, and the chopsticks used are also silver, which can be said to minimize the probability of poisoning.
Finally, when the emperor began to eat, he would carefully check the tableware and make sure there was no problem before he began to enjoy it.
The dignity of being an emperor can be seen from the complexity of dining, which really makes us ordinary people feel deeply.