桃花源记

English (for the teacher)

More than sixteen hundred years ago, in the Taiyuan years of the Eastern Jin, there was a man in Wuling who made his living by fishing. One day he took his little boat up a stream, and as he went along he quite forgot how far he had come.

Suddenly a peach grove appeared before him. For several hundred paces along both banks there was nothing but peach trees, without a single tree of any other kind among them. The grass was fresh and fragrant, and petals drifted down one after another until they covered the ground. The fisherman was amazed, and he went on further, wanting to see how deep the grove went.

Where the grove ended stood a mountain, and the stream flowed out of it right there. At the foot of the mountain was a small opening, and a little light seemed to come through from inside. The fisherman left his boat and squeezed in through the opening. At first the passage was so narrow that one person could only just get through. After a few dozen more paces it suddenly opened out: the land was flat and wide, the houses neat and orderly, with good fields, lovely ponds, mulberry trees and bamboo. Paths ran between the fields in every direction, and everywhere you could hear chickens and dogs. Men and women came and went in the fields at their work, dressed quite differently from people outside. Old people and children alike were at ease, their faces all smiles.

When the villagers saw the fisherman they were astonished and asked where he had come from. He answered every question. Then someone invited him home, set out wine, killed a chicken and cooked a meal for him. When the other villagers heard there was a guest, they all hurried over to ask for news of the outside world.

It turned out that their ancestors had fled the wars of the Qin dynasty, bringing wives, children and neighbours to this place cut off from the world; they had never gone out again, and all contact with outsiders had been lost. They asked the fisherman what dynasty it was out there now. To his surprise, they had never even heard of the Han, let alone the Wei and the Jin that came after it. The fisherman told them everything he knew, one thing after another, and as they listened they could not help sighing, deeply moved.

He stayed in the village for several days, and the other villagers took turns inviting him to their homes for meals. Before he left, the villagers told him: “What happens here is not worth telling the people outside.”

But once the fisherman was out, he found his boat and marked the way back at every turn. As soon as he was back in town he went to see the prefect and told him the whole story. The prefect at once sent men with him to follow the marks, but they lost their way and could never find the old path again.

Later a scholar named Liu Ziji heard about it and happily planned to go and look for it, but before he could go he fell ill and died. After that, nobody ever asked the way to the Peach Blossom Spring again.

The story comes from The Peach Blossom Spring by the Eastern Jin poet Tao Yuanming. Today Chinese people call any ideal, peaceful place far from war and worry a “Peach Blossom Spring beyond the world”. The pity is that, just like that fisherman, nobody can say where it really is.