Youyang's Peach Blossom Spring: a village named after a text

Tao Yuanming wrote in the Eastern Jin, between 317 and 420, of a fisherman who followed a stream through a grove of peach trees, found a rock opening barely wide enough for a person, and came out into fields, ponds, mulberries and a village whose people had fled the wars and never heard of the Han. He stayed, was fed, and went home; when he tried to return with others, the way was lost. The text is short, and it has been read for centuries as a picture of good government and of its absence. It is also a story about a boundary: the rock opening is a door, and what lies beyond it is not a paradise so much as an ordinary place that was left alone.

The Youyang Peach Blossom Spring is a 5A scenic area in the northern corner of the county, and the county seat itself stands in Taohuayuan Subdistrict, so the fable is an address as well as an attraction. The site does what such sites do: a grove, a rock opening, a path into a valley, a village of Tujia houses, and the fields and water that the text requires. There is more than one Peach Blossom Spring in China, because the text is famous enough to have several claimants, and Youyang's is one of the recognised ones. The place is therefore both a copy and an original: a landscape arranged to match a description, in a county where the description was already plausible.

The awkward fact is that a real village is being asked to be a fiction. The county is 83.54 per cent Tujia and 8.93 per cent Miao, 607,338 people at the 2020 census, and its own culture is not the fable's: the Baishou dance is performed here in big and small forms, with single, double and turning steps, and it was added to the national intangible heritage list in 2008. A village named after a text has to decide, every season, whether it is a place where people live or a place where a poem is staged. The best answer is the one the landscape gives: peach trees, a stream, fields in use, and an opening in the rock still only wide enough for one person.