"Liu Pengli, another son of King Xiao of Liang, was made king of Jidong in the sixth year of the..."

By: vivian on quarta-feira, setembro 16, 2015

“Liu Pengli, another son of King Xiao of Liang, was made king of Jidong in the sixth year of the middle period of Emperor Jing’s reign. Liu Pengli was arrogant and cruel, and paid no attention to the etiquette demanded between ruler and subject. In the evenings he used to go out on marauding expeditions with twenty or thirty slaves or young men who were in hiding from the law, murdering people and seizing their belongings for sheer sport. When the affair came to light in the twenty-ninth year of his rule it was found he had murdered at least 100 or more persons. Everyone in the kingdom knew about his ways, so that the people were afraid to venture out of their houses at night. The son of one of his victims finally sent a report to the throne [the Han Emperor], and the Han officials request that he be executed. The emperor could not bear to carry out their recommendation, but made him a commoner and banished him to Shangyong. His territory was taken over and made into the province of Dahe.”

- an account of possibly the oldest named serial killer. Liu Pengli was king of Jidong beginning in 144 BCE, and loved to kill people for fun. When the Han Emperor found out, he was unwilling to execute a relative, so Liu was only banished. His reputation was so well-known that we have two extant sources on his crimes, in the Hanshu and the Shiji. This is the description in the Shiji

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