The Peach Blossom Spring

He was a man of Wuling, and he made his living by fishing.

That day he poled his boat up a stream. It was not a stream he knew. The water was clear and ran smoothly, and every bend opened onto another bend, so he kept going. His paddle splashed in a steady rhythm. The banks slipped away behind him, each one just like the last.

At some point he no longer knew how far he had come. He could not tell how many bends lay between him and his landing, nor guess how many more lay ahead before the stream ran out. The old tale says it was just then, with the way forgotten, that the fisherman came upon the peach grove.

On both banks, for a stretch of a few hundred paces, there was nothing but peach trees. Not a single other kind of tree grew among them. No clump of bamboo, no old trunk pushed its way in between. The grass beneath the trees was fragrant and fresh. Blossoms drifted down, falling on his shoulders and onto the water, and floated downstream in a long pink trail behind the boat.

He sat still for a while, deeply puzzled. A grove of only one kind of tree was not natural. A real forest is always crowded, with every tree squeezing in wherever it can. This grove was as neat as if someone had planted it, and planted it a very long time ago.

By rights he should have turned his boat around there. He did the opposite. He kept poling, only because he wanted to know where the peach grove ended.

The peach grove ended exactly where the stream ended.

In front of him, a sheer mountain rose straight up and blocked the way. Water seeped out from its foot, and right there, in the rock face, was a small crack. He peered into it. There seemed to be light inside.

He left the boat there and squeezed in.

The first stretch was very narrow, so narrow that only one person could pass. His shoulders brushed the cold rock. There was stone above his head and stone under his feet, and he had to turn sideways and inch forward step by step. He went on like that for a few dozen steps.

Then the passage opened out.

Before him lay a stretch of flat land, wide and open and full of light. The houses stood neat and orderly, every roof in good repair. The fields were good, green plots running one after another to the edge of sight. The ponds were clear, holding the reflection of the sky all the way to the bottom. Mulberry and bamboo grew in patches around the village. Paths crossed one another between the fields, linking one house to the next.

And from one end to the other, the crowing of roosters and the barking of dogs carried clearly.

A man who has just squeezed through a dark, tight crack in the rock steps out and hears a rooster crow. No sound could say more plainly that people lived here, and had lived here a long time.

The villagers were out in the fields, some plowing, some planting, moving about at an easy pace. A few old people, their hair faded to a pale yellow, sat resting at the edge of the fields. Children with their hair hanging loose over their foreheads ran around the legs of the grown-ups. No one hurried. Everyone seemed content with the day they were having.

Then they saw him.

The whole village stopped short. It was not fear but astonishment, the astonishment of people who had never imagined that anyone could find a way in. They gathered around and asked where he had come from. He told them everything, from the landing where he had set out to the crack in the rock he had just squeezed through.

When he finished, one man invited him home at once. They poured wine, killed a chicken and cooked a meal for their guest. News of a stranger spread fast, and the whole village came, each person with a question to ask.

Then they told him their own story. Long ago, their ancestors had lived through a time of turmoil. So they led their wives and children, and the people of their home village, all the way in here. Once inside, they stayed. Not one of them ever left. Since then, the village had had no dealings with anyone outside.

Then someone asked him a question.

"What age is it now, out there?"

The fisherman sat in silence.

It was not a question asked for amusement. They truly meant it. Generation after generation had been born and grown up in this valley, drawing water from that pond and harvesting rice from those fields. Yet not one of them had ever stepped outside to see what had changed. They had never heard of the ages that came after the one their ancestors fled, not even a single name.

So he told them. He told them everything he knew, how things stood out there now, how people made their living. The whole village sat and listened, and when he finished, they only sighed.

For several days, as soon as one house had hosted him, another invited him in, and every house set out rice and wine. Then he asked leave to go home.

As they parted, the villagers left him with one gentle request. What he had seen in here should stay in here. He should not speak of it to people outside.

He squeezed back out through the crack and found his boat still waiting where he had left it. Then he poled home the way he had come. Only this time he did not travel like a man who was lost. Wherever there was an odd-shaped rock or a big tree, he marked it, one place after another, so that he could find the way in again.

Back in town, he went to see the chief official of the region and told him the whole story from start to finish. The official sent men to go with him and follow the marks.

The stream was still the stream. The woods were still the woods. But the marks no longer led anywhere. The party set out, lost their way, and searched on and on without ever finding the mountain with the crack in its rock. In the end they all went home empty-handed.

After that, one more man wanted to go. Liu Ziji of Nanyang was known as a man of learning and virtue. When he heard the story, he was overjoyed and made ready to set out. But that journey, too, never came to pass. And from then on, no one went asking the way to that landing again.

This tale comes from a short piece of old Chinese prose, known in English as The Peach Blossom Spring. Its title means, word for word, a record of the source of the peach blossom stream. It was written by the poet Tao Yuanming, who lived in the time of the Eastern Jin dynasty in China, more than 1,500 years ago. The piece is short. It takes less time to read than a cup of tea takes to cool. Yet ever since, people across the wide lands of East Asia have kept searching for the valley in its pages.

In Vietnam, people have kept it in their everyday speech. Whenever they come upon a place so quiet, so green and so lovely that even standing right there they cannot believe it is real, they simply call it chốn đào nguyên, a peach blossom spring. Say that, and everyone understands at once, with no need to explain. Vietnamese folklore has a tale with the same feeling. It is the story of Từ Thức, who strayed into a fairy grotto and came home to find his village utterly changed.

That is what a peach blossom spring is. It is real inside a story. It opens just once, for just one person, on the day that person forgets where they are going. Then it closes, and the crack in the rock lets no one through a second time.

For the fisherman of Wuling, it all began on a strange stream, so far upstream that he no longer knew how far he had come, with blossoms falling from the banks onto the water.