7. Han Hsiang Tzŭ, who gained admission to the Taoist paradise and climbed the peach-tree of Immortality. He is shown as a young man playing on a flute, and is specially worshipped by musicians.
8. Ho Hsien Ku, a maiden who wears a cloak of mug-wort leaves and carries a lotus. She is patroness of housewives.
The Immortals are commonly represented in a group paying court to Shou Lao, or crossing the sea on the backs of various strange creatures or other supernatural conveyances on their way to the Islands of Paradise. Grouped in pairs they lend themselves to the decoration of quadrangular objects.
Other frequenters of the Shou Shan are the twin genii[500] of Union and Harmony (ho ho êrh hsien), an inseparable pair, depicted as ragged mendicants with staff and broom, or as smiling boyish figures, the one with a lotus and the other holding a Pandora box of blessings, from which a cloud is seen to rise; Tung-fang So, who stole the peaches of Hsi Wang Mu and acquired thereby a longevity of nine thousand years, is represented as a smiling bearded old man, not unlike Shou Lao himself, carrying an enormous peach, or as a boy with a peach to recall his youthful exploit. Liu Han, with his familiar three-legged toad, a wild-looking person, who waves a string of cash in the air, and very closely resembles the Japanese Gama Sennin (the Hou Hsien Shêng of China); Wang Tzŭ-ch’iao, who rides on a crane playing a flute, and Huang An, the hermit, whose steed is a tortoise. The god of Alchemy is figured, according to the identification of a statuette in the Musée Guimet, as a tall, draped person with beard and moustaches flowing down in five long wisps, a leaf-shaped fan in his left hand, and beside him a small figure of a devotee who holds up a book with questioning gesture.
The Queen of the Genii is Hsi Wang Mu (Queen Mother of the West). Her home is in the K’un-lun mountains, and the peach tree of Longevity grows in her gardens. In the tenth century B.C., the Emperor Mu Wang is reputed to have visited her palace, and the reception forms a pleasing subject for the artist, as does also her return visit paid to the Emperor Wu Ti of the Han dynasty. She also figures frequently on porcelain with her fair attendants crossing the sea on a raft, flying on the back of a phœnix or standing with a female attendant who carries a dish of peaches. Her messengers are blue-winged birds like the doves of Venus, who carry the fruit of longevity to favoured beings. With her attendant phœnix she presents a strong analogy with Juno and her peacock; and her Western habitat has favoured the theories which would connect her with Græco-Roman mythology, though her consort Hsi Wang Fu (King Father of the West and a personage obviously invented ad hoc) is quite insignificant and has nothing in common with the cloud-compelling Jove.
There is a female figure which is scarcely distinguishable from one of the attendants of Hsi Wang Mu on the one hand and from Lan Ts’ai-ho on the other. This is the Flower Fairy (Hua hsien) who carries a basket of flowers suspended from a hoe. And there are besides numerous magicians of more or less repute, such as Chang Chiu-ko, who is seen transforming pieces cut from his scanty garments into butterflies; and a host of nameless hsien of local fame who figure in mountain retreats, such as the Ssŭ hao or four hoary hermits.[501]
The animals connected with Taoist lore include the eight fabulous horses of Mu Wang which brought him to the palace of Hsi Wang Mu. They are usually seen at pasture frisking about in wild gambols. The deer, the familiar of Shou Lao, is depicted usually with a ling chih fungus in his mouth; the toad and hare live in the moon where they pound the elixir of immortality; and the tortoise develops a long bushy tail after a thousand years of existence. All these are suggestive of longevity, as is also the crane and a number of flowers, fruits and trees such as the pine, bamboo and prunus (the three friends), the chrysanthemum, the willow, the peach, the gourd, and more especially the ling chih fungus, the polyporus lucidus, which was originally an emblem of good luck, but afterwards of longevity.
The head of the ling chih closely resembles[502] that of the familiar ju-i sceptre which grants every wish, an auspicious object commonly seen in the hands of Taoist genii; and the same form occurs in a decorative border (see Plate [77], Fig. 2) which is variously known as the ju-i head border, the ju-i cloud border, or the cloud-scroll border, the conventional cloud being commonly rolled up in this form. It will also be found that formal ornaments, pendants and lambrequins often take the form of the ju-i head in Chinese decoration.
The attributes of the Eight Immortals occur among the many symbols used in porcelain ornament; and among the landscapes will be found the gardens of Hsi Wang Mu and Mount P’êng-lai,[503] one of the three islands of the blessed, situated in the ocean east of China. Here the fountain of life flows in a perpetual stream: “the pine, the bamboo, the plum, the peach, and the fungus of longevity grow for ever on its shores; and the long-haired tortoise disports in its rocky inlets, and the white crane builds her nest on the limbs of its everlasting pines.”[504] Presumably, too, the Shou Shan is situated on this delectable island; and perhaps also the heavenly pavilion (t’ien t’ang), which appears among clouds as the goal to which a crane is often seen guiding some of the Taoist genii. Possibly, too, the conventional border of swirling waves punctuated by conical rocks carries a suggestion of the rocky islands of paradise rising from the sea.
