Ballad of Peach-Blossom Spring, Wang Wei (300 Tang Shi #78)

Once upon a time around 400CE, during the extended strife of the Six Dynasties era, the poet Tao Qian wrote a utopian fantasy story about a fisherman finding a hidden valley populated by refugees from the civil wars of the transition between Qin and Han dynasties, around 200 BCE. 300 years later, five years into what would become the golden age of Xuanzong’s reign, a teenage Wang Wei retold the story as a folk-song-style poem with a focus not on the refuge, but on the spiritual states of the residents and the fisherman.

Ballad of Peach-Blossom Spring, Wang Wei

( A fisher sailed upstream, charmed by the mountain spring— / Peach blossoms on both banks, an old ford in between )

---L.

Index of Chinese translations