The Tale of King Mu, Son of Heaven is an ancient Chinese text which  was found written on strips of bamboo in a royal tomb dating to 296BC.  It tells of the travels of King Mu of Zhou, a 10thc BC king of probably the most  important of the many Chinese kingdoms of the time. Mu is a real historical figure  & is thought to have travelled thousands of miles across China into central Asia and perhaps even as far as present day Iran.   

However King Mu stands with one foot in history and the other in mythology,  so nothing is quite what but seems.  The story goes that  he wasn’t just exploring for the sake of it, there was something very specific he was seeking:  the celestial gardens on Mount Kunlun where he could eat the peaches of immortality.  These gardens belonged to the Queen Mother of the West who a few hundred years later also  encountered another great, and equally obsessed,  Chinese ruler,  the Emperor Wu.

I ought to point out what I’m sure you all know that there are many ways of  westernising Chinese characters and words , that translation itself is  fraught with complexities, that virtually every  character/place/idea has several names, forms, and versions  BUT  while I can’t promise to always get things right I have tried to be consistent with my errors throughout.  

The story of King Mu and his journeys has grown and grown over the centuries, indeed millennia.  That’s partly because when the tomb was opened and the bamboo strips discovered they weren’t all there. Inevitably that has meant that the legend has taken on a life of its own and been embroidered, so now bears little resemblance to what is known of the original! Today’s post  is based on later versions of the story because otherwise there’d be little related to gardens in it.

Mount Kunlun where King Mu was headed  is the main peak of the Kunlun Mountains,  a range that stretches for 3000 km across western China, down into Tibet and then onwards into Central Asia.  Now you’d think that mountains can’t move but at various points in history – and  mythology – the name has been applied to other mountains and indeed mountain ranges.  To confuse matters further, in  Chinese mythology  Mount Kunlun evolves over the centuries so that it’s understood not only as  a real mountain  but a supernatural paradise where the various deities lived, rather like Mount Olympus in Greek mythology.

The ancient Chinese philosophical and religious tradition of Taoism focuses on living in harmony with the Tao – the life force that flows through and connects everything; the natural order of the universe.

In Taoism all mountains are held to be sacred.   but Mount Kunlun is believed to be  special because, despite being snow-covered,  it  was home to a divine garden-realm with  orchards of peach trees, presided over by the Queen Mother of the West or to give her her Chinese name, Xi Wangmu.

Now you might wonder why it was orchards of peach trees rather than anything else.  Its because in Chinese mythology, peach trees (specifically the xiantao or “immortality peach”) are sacred symbols of longevity, or even better perhaps immortality, – akin perhaps to the Golden Apples of the  Hesperides .

According to legend, King Mu  heard about the power of these peach trees and quite liked the idea of being immortal so he decided to try and visit Mount Kunlun and  ask the Queen Mother of the West for permission to gather and eat some of the fruit.

The earliest account of this legend is called Shanghaijing or Classic of Mountains and Seas , written somewhere between 400BC and 200BC . It presents Xi Wangmu as a powerful and terrifying figure,  resembling a monster rather than a goddess. She is said to have a human body, with a leopard’s tail, and the fangs of a tiger. She was believed to have the power to cause natural disasters, including floods, famine and plagues.

Over the centuries, however, as the myth develops, her persona changes and she is transformed from a ferocious monster into a much more benevolent  deity. and in particular with one extraordinary gift. She knows,  and can impart,  the secrets of immortality,  Over time her status increases even further – the nearest parallel I can think of is the transformation of the Virgin Mary – and is also later portrayed as the wife of the Jade Emperor, who is  the supreme deity and ruler of Heaven.

Xi Wangmu has a  palace on Kunlun high in the clouds with   a beautiful garden,  a  lake, and  of course those  orchards full of trees bearing the Peaches of Immortality.

They were of three kinds.  One variety had tiny blossoms, and allowed those who eat its fruit to have their minds opened to higher wisdom and as well as  a much longer life. These only produced fruit every 3,000 years. 

A sweeter variety with multiple blossoms was rarer, and gave those who ate them the ability to fly as well as look eternally young but they only fruited every 6,000 years.

The third sort  had  purple streaked fruit with pale yellow stones. They ripen only every 9,000 years but whoever eats them achieves immortality and  enjoys a rank equal to that of the Sun and the Moon which were both assumed to be living beings in Chinese mythology). 

 

So every  3000 years when the peach trees in her orchard bear fruit the Queen Mother of the West would hold a sumptuous banquet  to celebrate and would give Peaches of Eternal Life to the  Immortals – a group of legendary beings  in Taoism who achieved spiritual perfection, long life, and supernatural powers – so their immortality may continue. 

The story  has maintained a grip on Chinese culture right through into modern times – as you can tell from this painting by the formidable dowager Empress CiXi at the very end of the 19thc and the many YouTube videos about it.

Unfortunately The gardens on Mount Kunlun are never fully described in one source. Instead our understanding of it comes from a  sentence or two in several different early texts which then have to be assembled to give us a better picture. There are very few illustrations of the gardens & none of them are contemporary, with most from the 16th century onwards.

 We know from these early written descriptions  that Kunlun’s gardens and landscapes are   extremely well managed.  They are an ordered paradise—with gates, courts, orchards, and terraces run by a celestial bureaucracy. Within them “The Queen Mother of the West dwells by the Jade Pool “and that   “the pool is encircled by precious stones and shaded by wondrous trees.”  

Having decided he was going to find Kunlun – and not really knowing where it was –  King Mu obviously needs a retinue but rather than take an army which might be misinterpreted by other states on his way to the mountains,  he opts instead for a small group of just seven companions. He travels in an 8-horsed  chariot driven by  Zaofu his charioteer and of course, this being on the border of historical reality and myth they travel at up to 1000 miles a day.  They have all sorts of adventures crossing China and countries beyond  before they finally arrive at Mount Kunlun and are admitted to climb up to the Queen Mother of the West’s palace, where they are greeted by her by the side of the Jade pool.

By good fortune Mu arrives just in time for a peach banquet – although only in time for the 3000 year old peaches rather than the 6000 or 9000 year old ones. The Queen Mother sends servants  to gather some fruit for the  banquet for her guest and Mu  stayed at the Jade Pool for several days eating and drinking and conversing.

In earlier versions of the story Xi Wangmu isn’t a goddess at all but a sovereign of an equally powerful state. The two are said to have exchanged poems and songs, and promised each other they would meet again – although, of course,  they never do.

 

Eventually  King Mu returns home, and although he isn’t made immortal by the peaches he does have his mind opened to higher wisdom. He is recorded as reigning to a total of 55 years and living to 105 so it wasn’t all bad.  A more interesting philosophical line is taken by the 5thc BC Taoist text Liezi  which develops the idea of Mu acquiring higher wisdom.  It suggests that on his return from Paradise  Mu realises that ordinary pleasures no longer satisfy him, and that the world is rather dull and disappointing. On the other hand  the idea of returning to meet Xi Wangmu [which never happens] suggests  the impossibility of recovering Paradise. As the Son of Heaven he also has  temporal obligations to his subjects because his highest duty is not personal pleasure or transcendence but the maintenance of  stability and order in his realm.

King Mu  is one of only two mortals who is ever recorded  tasting the Queen Mother’s  peaches.  The other was the Emperor Wu of Han [156 – 87BC]  who was arguably China’s greatest early ruler. He too wasn’t satisfied with his earthly power and position and like Mu sought immortality.  But  accounts of his life written several centuries later,  when he had achieved semi-mythical status, go much further

The  Han Wudi Neizhuan (“Inner Biography of Emperor Wu of Han”) is a classical Chinese narrative – its not a biography in the modern sense  but a work of religious and literary imagination which has been influential in the development of Taoist mythology.  Wu does not journey to Kunlun to meet the Queen Mother but quite the reverse: she visits  him.  It’s a complete inversion of the Mu story. Whereas Mu had to go west to find paradise, Wu is such  a powerful earthly ruler that the Queen Mother decides to come to him.

 [For the translation from the Chinese I’ve been dependent on AI but I’ve run it through two different systems and it comes out roughly the same]

 

Wu is informed in advance by a messenger from Kunlun  so he can carry out purification rituals and makes his palace and gardens a sacred precinct into which Heaven itself may descend. Then the Queen Mother of the West descends  in a purple cloud chariot, drawn by a nine-coloured dragon, attended by fifty celestial maidens. wearing a robe of wondrous brilliance, etc etc.

She commands the Emperor to sit with her while she organises a meal, ordering one of her serving maidens to fetch the peaches she has brought from Kunlun. They bring in  seven immortal peaches  on a jade plate. They are the size of ducks eggs, but round and green. She gave four to the Emperor and ate three herself.

After eating, the Emperor collects up the stones and why Xi Wangmu asks why, he replies: “I want to plant them.”  Was this the gardener within him? or maybe because he thinks he could become immortal by growing them and eventually eating their fruit.

Of course it’s not quite that simple. The goddess reminds him that these peaches only bear fruit every three thousand years so you are unlikely to live long enough but in any case “the soil of the Central China is too thin; if you plant them, they will not grow.”

The Taoist argument about this would be that the, “soil” may be symbolic as well as literal—suggesting that the human realm lacks the conditions required for immortality.

Xi Wangmu calls in another goddess to discuss what she’s said and done.  It ends with  an interesting insight into Taoist philosophy. The goddess declares: “although one ought to instruct him in the Highest Way, I fear he is not truly of the calibre required for immortality.”  A harsh judgement perhaps given that Xi Wangmu has left Heaven to meet him and has shared the peaches of immortality , but perhaps it was all a test of Wu’s suitability and just goes to prove that political power and spiritual attainment so rarely coincide.

 

So of course Wu is not made immortal but dies in 87BC although he did have a very long reign. Perhaps to your surprise, given what the goddess has said,  he did save the peach stones -or it was said much later. While he may have tried planting some at least one survived safely and was presented to the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty.some 1400 hundred years later. That story was almost certainly invented by that Ming emperor to symbolise the transfer of heavenly favour from one great dynasty to another. Whether anyone actually believed the story is almost beside the point because it was politically useful but in any case it helped he peaches of immortality live on and become legendary.

For once there’s very little I can suggest by way of places to find further information, but I’ll try and follow this post up with another about the immortal peaches one day.