by Pu Songling
Gejin remarked to Chang, “Since you’ve already had a glimpse of my younger sister, Yuban, you know she’s not unattractive, and she’s about the same age as your brother, so they’d undoubtedly make a very happily married couple.” Chang smiled upon hearing this and playfully asked for Gejin to act as matchmaker. “Certainly, if you want it to happen,” she responded, “there’ll be no problem.”
“How’re you going to make it happen?” he asked happily.
“My sister and I are on very good terms,” replied Gejin. “We can send a servant woman with a pair of horses and carriage to go pick her up and bring her here.” Chang was afraid that the prior matter of the elopement might stir up trouble, so he didn’t dare agree to her plan. “Nothing bad will happen,” she reassured him. Hence Chang directed a carriage to be sent and that Yuban be accompanied by Granny Mulberry.
A few days later, the old woman arrived in Caozhou. Just as she was approaching the village gates, she climbed down from the carriage, instructed the driver to wait there in the road and then took advantage of the evening darkness to enter the village. After a good long while, she returned with Yuban and together they climbed into the carriage and rode off.
The next night, they slept in the carriage and then at the beginning of the fifth watch, they set off again. Gejin had calculated their time of arrival, so she sent Daqi out in splendid attire and he met up with them about fifty li outside Luoyang. He took over and drove the carriage back home, where drums and instruments met them by the light of wedding candles, and after bowing respectfully to each other, Daqi and Yuban completed the marriage rites. From this point forward, the brothers both enjoyed their beautiful wives and with each passing day, the household grew wealthier.
One day, a few dozen bandits came riding up, thundering onto their estate. Chang quickly realized what was happening, so he herded everyone in the house upstairs. The outlaws quickly spread out, surrounding the building. Looking down from above, Chang courteously asked them, “Do you have something against us?”
“Nothing specifically against you,” said one of the bandits. “But there are two things that we’d ask of you: we’ve heard that you have two women here who’re without equals in all the world, so we’d like a look at them; and for each of the fifty-eight of us, we want five hundred taels.” Then the men laid firewood around the foundation of the house, making ready to set it on fire from all sides.
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Fifth watch: That is, between 3:00-5:00 a.m.
Chang agreed to give them the money that they’d demanded; this, however, wasn’t enough to satisfy the bandits completely, so they prepared to set fire to the building, terrifying the family members. Gejin determined to go downstairs with Yuban and refused to listen to any attempts to stop them.
Wearing stunning clothes and make-up, they descended—but stopped three steps from the bottom, where they told the outlaws, “We sisters are fairy spirits living for a time in the mortal world, so what fear do we have of outlaws and robbers! We were prepared to give you ten thousand taels, but we figure now that you wouldn’t dare accept it.”
The crowd of bandits all bowed respectfully, together answering, “We wouldn’t dare.”
As the sisters turned to leave, one of the bandits cried, “It’s just a trick!”
When Gejin heard this, she turned dramatically, stood there for quite some time, and then declared, “If you intend to do something, you’d better attempt it now, without waiting any longer.” The outlaws all looked at each other in silence. The sisters unhurriedly departed, walking back upstairs. Looking up, the bandits watched their receding steps, then uproariously started fleeing.
Two years went by, then each of the sisters gave birth to a son, so they finally began to talk about themselves: “Our surname is Wei, and our mother had the title Lady of Caozhou conferred upon her.” Chang found this suspicious, since there were no influential families with the name Wei in Caozhou, and then, if a great family was missing its daughters, how is it possible that it would disregard the fact? Although he didn’t dare pursue the matter with questions, he thought it odd, nonetheless.
Consequently, he found a pretext for visiting Caozhou again, and as he passed through its vicinity, he made inquiries, discovering that there were no noble families in the area named Wei. Thus it was that Chang took up temporary residence with his former host again.
Almost immediately, he noticed a poem hanging on the wall there that was dedicated to the Lady of Caozhou, which he found very strange indeed, and so he asked his host about it. His host just laughed about it and asked him if he wanted to go see the Lady of Caozhou. They came to a particular tree peony that stood as tall as the eaves of the house.
When Chang asked him why it had been given its name, his host replied that it was considered the number one flower in Caozhou, and thus someone who shared that perspective had playfully conferred the title upon it. When Chang asked him what variety of tree peony it was, his host replied, “It’s a Purple Gejin.” Chang felt even more unsettled upon hearing this and began to suspect that his Gejin was a flower fairy.
Upon returning home, he didn’t dare mention what he’d learned, instead reciting the poem to his wife, to observe her reaction. Gejin knit her brows, her face flushed with anger, then she rushed out, calling for Yuban to get their children and join her, telling Chang, “Three years ago, I was moved when you looked at me with love, and thus I submitted my body to your embraces; now you just look at me with misgivings, so how can we possibly stay together!”
At that moment, she and Yuban both threw their children far away into the distance, and when the boys fell to earth, they simply vanished. Chang was horrified, then the two women also disappeared. He deeply regretted his earlier comments, but the damage had already been done.
Several days after this, at the place where the two boys had fallen, two tree peonies sprouted and in a single night grew to be a chi in diameter, then later that same year they bloomed, one purple and one white, with heads the size of a platter, much larger than ordinary Gejin and Yuban peonies, and possessing an especially abundant quantity of petals. In a few years, they grew into a shady thicket; when the peonies were separated and transplanted elsewhere, they metamorphosed into unique new varieties, so no one knew what to call them. From then on, the tree peonies flourished and there were none that could equal those of Luoyang.
The collector of these strange tales remarks, “Supernatural beings can understand when others express obsessive feelings for them, but one can’t say whether the flowers would reciprocate those feelings in the same fashion. In his chilly little office, Bai Juyi fantasized that a flower became his wife, but if that flower could actually have spoken to him, would he have ever needed to pry into her background? I feel sorry that Scholar Chang didn’t grasp that!”
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Chi: A measure equal to 1/3 meter.
Bai Juyi: A Tang dynasty poet and government official, Bai (772-846 C.E.) often wrote about flowers, and many of those poems were melancholic reveries on solitude.
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