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Peach of Immortality

By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.

Description

Xi Wangmu's orchard, then a theft in a novel

Han and later tradition place the Queen Mother of the West (Xi Wangmu) at Kunlun with peaches that ripen on a long cycle and confer long life. Journey to the West has Sun Wukong steal them — Ming vernacular fiction using the older orchard. Daoist lives and festival imagery spread the peach. The fruit is a literary and religious image of longevity, not a botanical cultivar with a surviving tree. Admit the gap between early Queen Mother myth and the novel's comic raid.

Primary Sources

“In the garden of the Queen Mother of the West the peaches of long life ripen only after many years; whoever eats them lives on.”
Han and later Xi Wangmu tradition(c. 2nd century BCE–later)

“Sun Wukong slipped into the orchard and ate the peaches of immortality before the banquet of the immortals.”
Journey to the West (Xiyouji)(c. 1592 CE)

Powers & Abilities

LongevityImmortalityDivine Vitality