Did the Chinese herbalist Li Ching-Yuen live to the age of 256? No, that's not true: No record exists to prove that he was born in 1677. His claim of extreme longevity is likely a myth to encourage practices believed to prolong lifespans.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok by the user @histories513 on March 3, 2023, with the caption "The human who lived for 256 years." The video opened:
There is a person who lived for a whopping 256 years, from 1677 to 1933, from the Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed May 31 15:20:00 2023 UTC)
In the video, the narration over a grainy photograph of an old man claims that Li Ching-Yuen, also spelled Li Ching-yun, lived to the age of 256. The video also claims that he was 210 cm in height and had 24 wives, who bore him 180 children, and at the age of 71, he was sprightly enough to become a martial arts master and a tactical advisor.
A man named Li Ching-Yuen who exhibited longevity did probably exist in China, but his claim of living beyond the age of 200 years remains unproven.
Li's obituary by the New York Times noted that at the time of his death in 1933, he claimed to be born in 1736, but a Time dispatch from 1929 stated that another man had claimed to have found a record that put Li's year of birth at 1677. Records that authenticate his year of birth have not been seen by either publication.
According to an article on extreme longevity published by Current Gerontology and Geriatrics Research, Li Ching-Yuen's "fantastical" age claim is an example of a "myth" of extreme longevity that encourages certain practices in Daoism, which Li shared in a 1928 book, titled "The Secret of Immortality."
"Just from a demographic point of view, a claim of 256 is impossible," Thomas T. Perls, one of the authors of the article, told Australian Associated Press.
The title of the oldest person to have lived in the world by Guinness World Records is currently held by Jeanne Louise Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122.
The video contains other errant claims. While it claims that the average lifespan for Li's contemporaries was around 50 years, according to data from Statista, life expectancy in China back then was around 32 years. Li's claim would mean he had outlived the average person by eightfold.
