The peach, or tao 桃, boasts long-held prominence in traditional Chinese culture due to its mystical association with longevity, health, and vitality. Recurrent portrayal throughout folklore and historical literature elevated the humble fruit, which thenceforth became established as an object of mythological divinity. Fantastic, whimsy-laced legends tell of Xi Wangmu and her Peaches of Immortality, whose power to confer longevity and even immortality upon consumption posed temptation to both god and man.

Through the evolution of fable, the goddess Xi Wangmu emerged from a chrysalis of primordial, shamanic fury enlightened; she shed her cronelike stigma and arose as the distinguished Queen Mother of the West, supremely poised over heaven and earth. She presided over the dual forces of life and death, creation and destruction—hers was the chaotic, feminine domain of unrestrained yin.

The Queen Mother of the West excelled in husbandry and cultivated flourishing gardens about the perimeter of her jade-hewn inhabitance. Her realm, the Jade Pool, was set upon a high place in the western skies, at the holy threshold between heaven and earth. It was the world pillar, and its burgeoning peach trees the nexus whereat divinity and humanity converged; their branches pierced eternity above, and roots plunged into worldly soil below. Entry to her celestial orchard was the rarefied reward of virtue, as Xi Wangmu permitted only the worthy to bear witness to the Peaches of Immortality.

Her mythical trees blossomed once every thousand years and bore three divine varieties of peach, which ripened to yield enchantment and deification in increments of three thousand years. The first conferred great longevity, increasing its consumer’s lifespan by the time the fruit took to mature; the second granted miraculous ability, empowering its consumer with flight and eternal youth; the final peach immortalized, elevating its consumer to deity.