The spring no one could find again

The tale is short enough to tell almost in full. In the Taiyuan era of the Jin dynasty, a fisherman of Wuling worked a stream in hills he thought he knew. One day he came on a forest of peach trees in blossom along both banks, hundreds of paces of them with no other tree mixed in, the fresh grass bright and the fallen petals thick on the ground. Following the stream to its source he found a hill with a small opening that seemed to hold light; leaving his boat and squeezing through, he came out into a level country of fields, ponds, mulberry and bamboo, where chickens and dogs could be heard between the farmsteads. The people were startled to see him, then kind. Their ancestors, they explained, had fled the chaos of the Qin dynasty with wives, children and neighbours and had never come out; they asked what the present dynasty was, having heard of nothing since Qin — not the Han, and certainly not the Wei or the Jin of the fisherman's own day. He stayed more than a week as a guest. On leaving he was told gently that the place was not worth mentioning to outsiders. He marked his route as he went and reported it at once; the searchers lost the way. A gentleman of Nanyang named Liu Ziji set out to find the valley and died before he could; after that, no one asked the way again.

The fisherman was 'a man of Wuling', and that geography is why Changde holds the claim. Wuling was the old name of the Changde area — the city's central district still bears it — and the Jin-era Wuling commandery matched today's Changde boundaries, which is the administrative argument the local scenic-area authority makes in insisting that Taoyuan County fits the tale best. In that county, on the Yuan River upstream of the city, a national scenic area named Taohuayuan keeps the identification going: it is famous, in the words of the standard description, for plentiful peach blossoms and natural scenery. What the site offers is the landscape of the opening scene — blossom in season along the water — rather than a sealed valley, since the story's village was specifically undiscoverable. The claim is guarded with feeling, because the county is not alone: more than thirty places across China have announced themselves as the real Peach Blossom Spring, from a stockaded village in Yunnan to a karst cave at Tongren and a valley below Hengshan, and one northern town that grows no peach trees at all joined in. When a Chongqing attraction advertised itself as the true site, Changde netizens fought back in a days-long online quarrel.

The story's afterlife is larger than any valley. Four characters from it — shiwai taoyuan, 'the peach spring beyond this world' — became a standard Chinese idiom for an unspoiled place off the beaten path, and sometimes, more darkly, for an unrealistic dream. Tang poets took the theme up within three centuries: Li Bai worked the reference into 'A Gift to Wang Lun' around 750, and Wang Wei, Zhang Xu, Han Yu and Liu Yuxi all wrote versions of the Peach Blossom journey; Song poets answered, and painters followed, until Peach Blossom Spring pictures became a subject of their own. The name travelled into buildings: one of the forty scenes of the Old Summer Palace at Beijing was laid out as 'Wuling Spring Beauty' after the tale, and the architect I. M. Pei ran a two-hundred-metre tunnel into the hills of Japan so that visitors to his Miho Museum would emerge, as the fisherman did, into sudden light. A Taiwanese play and film, 'Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring', has been performed since 1986. Every borrowing confirms the point of the original: paradise is a place on a map that no longer exists — which is exactly what makes it portable, and what makes one county's peach blossoms argue with another's.