Putin's fear of death is his weak spot Kate Maltby

What do you give the dictator who has everything? Throughout history, autocrats have hankered after the elixir of eternal life but, if you're on a diplomatic visit to China, promising it might play havoc with protocol.

- Kate Maltby

Two and a half millennia before Vladimir Putin visited Xi Jinping for last week’s military parade in Beijing, the ancient texts tell of a dignitary who presented an exotic substance to King Qingxiang of Chu, promising it could confer immortality. A nosy guard observed the exchange and snaffled the lot.

King Qingxiang condemned the thief to death. A canny adviser persuaded him to commute the sentence. Kill the guard, and you prove that the elixir he had just consumed provided no protection from death whatsoever. What greater insult could there be to the foreign guest than to prove him a liar? Instead, diplomatic protocol required that the pilfering guard be kept in the peak of health: a lesser evil than forcing one’s boastful guest to lose face.

Xi may have borne this story in mind on Wednesday, as he smiled at Putin's talk of mortality-busting advances in biotechnology.

Microphones picked them up, just as Xi was musing on the relative youth of today’s septuagenarians. (“In the past, it used to be rare for someone to be older than 70 and these days they say that at 70 one’s still a child.”) This is perhaps self-serving: Xi is 72. But it was Putin who went further, expounding on one of his favourite subjects: eternal life. “With the development of biotechnology,” we can just catch him saying, “human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality.”