serial killers from the likes of ted bundy jeffrey dahmer john wayne gacy jack the ripper ed gein
anthony soul and others have been an object of endless fascination for people throughout history
and for good reason you can look at these people's backgrounds their childhood you can look at their
physiology their psychology nature versus nature you can look at the historical aspect of it
these are fascinating cases a debate that has emerged over the years is who was the first not
just in terms of folklore and myths and legends but in terms of historical sources and this name
that has come up is one that you may not have heard of and that is Liu Pengli one day as i
was falling down the sort of internet rabbit hole of random things i was looking at i came across
this article about this guy named Liu Pengli and i said who the heck is this guy and it turns out
he was probably the very first serial killer in world history in terms of reported sources
but the sites that i was looking at didn't seem to be very reputable sites in places like reddit
and the historians hut in various personal blogs and i just wanted to look for myself
who was this guy was he really the world's first serial killer what is the actual
source say about this guy not just in english but also the chinese sources as well i wanted to go
to the primary sources and see if this was true before we really get started let's talk about the
definition of a serial killer generally speaking it is someone who's killed three or more people
kind of in regularly spaced intervals for over a month and even for longer usually it's done for
some sort of psychological gratification whether it be sexual or otherwise maybe even just for fun
there also seems to be a predictable pattern of behavior in the way that they choose their victims
or the way that they carry out their work so to speak so let's talk about Liu Pengli
so who was the opponent well he dates back to the han dynasty of china and this is way way back in
history Liu Pengli was a prince of the han dynasty the third son of prince Liu Wu which made him the
grandson of emperor Wen of china so the grandson of an emperor it's a pretty big deal right
as the grandson of an emperor and coming from a family of wealth and privilege he was granted
various allotments of land and he was allowed to sort of do whatever he wanted with that land and
the people on this land and in the years following his death it was reported by historians that he
was of extremely cruel man and he employed extremely cruel tactics to kind of subjugate
people and also just mess with people for fun even to the extent of murdering them a fascinating
aspect of the story is that he did not do this alone he was known for traveling with a band of
marauders for lack of a better word him and his friends and his slaves even would go out and just
slaughter tons of people and his supposed body count was over a hundred over a hundred souls
is what the actual source says instead of sourcing from these personal sites i jumped onto wikipedia
as you do and i looked at the sources on wikipedia and i found this thing called the
book of han but i can't find the english version so i start looking around for the chinese version
because this is a chinese story told by Si Maqian the records of the grand historian
and the book of former hat and i start looking all of this goes back to really one single paragraph
that's all that's written about this prince of g-dong i find it on this site called ctx.org
sure enough there it is he's arrogant and cruel and will go out on marauding expeditions with tens
of slaves or young men who are hiding from the law so these are outlaws that he's traveling with so
like marauders like i said before murdering people and seizing their belongings for sheer sport
confirmed victims exceeded 100 and these murders were known across the kingdom so
people were afraid of leaving their homes at night eventually the son of one of his victims
accused him to the emperor and the officials of the court requested that Liu Pengli be executed
however the emperor could not bear to have his own nephew killed and Liu Pengli was made a commoner
and banished and his sovereignty was abolished and his land was reclaimed by the emperor
so there you have it right there you have the chinese and the english put right next to each
other the translation is not bad it is actually attested by historical records
so why was Liu Pengli going out and doing all this it seems like he was doing it for fun for sport
for the game for the love of the game you know and this is a sort of classic serial killer traits
he has no feelings about this sort of thing it seemed to be all about the power the fact that he
could do these things and the fact that he could get away with all of these crimes but was there
any sort of sexual gratification to this who knows the sources don't say and we can't assume that
was a sort of abnormal psychology going on there some sort of psychological problems well
again the sources don't say but it seems at least that seems pretty obvious to me
you could sort of make a case that times were more cruel back then people did this sort of thing more
commonly silencing enemies and things like that but these common people don't seem like enemies
it is famously said that history is written by the winners and it is written with a narrative in mind
to put stories together and put trends together to make an overall story arc and to make sense
of lots of events so there is that aspect of it that may cast all this into doubt and remember
this is the second century bc over 2000 years ago and we have a record of it which would make him as
far as i know the earliest known serial killer and as we mentioned before history is written
a little bit differently here in china you have confucius who wrote his own annals of history and
then you have Si Maqian who wrote the records of the grand historian which was actually inspired by
confucius's writing and sort of modeled after that and so much him later came out and said
himself of the style of writing he talks about how it's sort of a moral guide to living it's not
simply a historical record he wrote about the work of confucius and said it distinguishes
what is suspicious and doubtful clarifies what's right and wrong and settles points
which are uncertain it calls good good and bad bad honors the worthy and condemns the unworthy
etc and he modeled his own work after this type of work so you notice throughout the records of the
grant historian you see morality tales coming up so there is something to think about here is this
actually true or is this sort of a morality tale or was it exaggerated there's a lot of
doubt it's possible that it happened but not to the extent of over a hundred souls were lost
and i mean who knows it is a classic problem of early history where you simply don't have
a variety of sources talking about what's happened you usually will have one source
so it's up to you do you think that this actually happened and in the way that it was recorded or
do you think it may have been exaggerated was it toyed with or was it simply made up let me know
in the comments and that is where we are going to end today's video thank you all very much
for watching let me know if you like the video smash that like button and check out my patreon
if you feel like throwing me a buck or two and um yeah again thank you all very much for watching
you