The Chrysanthemum Wife Who Grew Rich From the Flowers He Refused to Sell / 黄英

A Shuntian scholar, a brother and sister surnamed Tao, and the flower that answered the oldest Chinese question of all — does a gentleman stay poor on principle, or may he eat well and keep his soul?

From Liaozhai Zhiyi (聊斋志异 · Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio), Volume XI, tale 《黄英》

After Pu Songling (蒲松龄, 1640–1715) · Retold in English with annotations

Before You Begin

There are two kinds of people who love chrysanthemums in China, and this story is about the war between them.

The first loves the flower as a moral emblem. For him the chrysanthemum is the plant that blooms last, after every other flower has surrendered to the frost. It is the flower of Tao Yuanming (陶渊明), the gentleman who quit a petty official post rather than bow for a sack of grain, and went home to pick chrysanthemums by his eastern fence. To sell such a flower would be like selling the family altar: the thing is not merchandise, and the moment it becomes merchandise the meaning drains out of it.^{[1]The chrysanthemum's moral identity in Chinese literature is fixed by Tao Yuanming (陶渊明, c. 365–427), the Jin–Song recluse who resigned after only eighty-odd days as magistrate of Pengze rather than "bow for five pecks of grain" (不为五斗米折腰). His poem "Drinking Wine V" (《饮酒·其五》) contains the most famous line in Chinese flower poetry: "Picking chrysanthemums by the eastern fence, I gaze leisurely at the southern mountain" (采菊东篱下，悠然见南山). From this point the "eastern fence" (东篱） and the chrysanthemum became inseparable shorthand for the poor, principled scholar-recluse — which is exactly the tradition Ma Zicai claims to defend and Pu Songling gently interrogates.}

The second loves the flower as a flower, grows it magnificently, and sees no sin in letting other people pay for the pleasure of owning it. In the early Qing dynasty when Pu Songling wrote, this second kind of person was no longer a marginal figure. Commerce had flooded into the lives of the scholar class. Merchants grew rich while examination candidates starved on their dignity, and a generation of educated men were forced to ask an uncomfortable question: is poverty actually a proof of virtue, or is it just poverty?^{[2]Huang Ying's argument belongs to a real Ming–Qing debate. The commercial boom of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries enriched merchants while degree-holding shi (scholar-official families) often sank into debt, forcing writers to re-examine the old hierarchy of the four occupations (士农工商), in which merchants ranked last. Pu Songling (1640–1715), a perpetually failed examination candidate who lived for decades as a private secretary and tutor, returns repeatedly in Liaozhai to money, patronage, and the question whether poverty is virtue or merely bad luck. The story's joke — a flower spirit out-arguing a puritan about commerce — is also the author's self-examination.}

Pu Songling puts the question into a plot so gentle and funny that a reader can finish the story and only afterwards realize he has been handed a theological argument in the form of a domestic comedy. The spirit in this tale does not drink anyone's blood. She grows flowers, balances books, builds a house, and marries a stubborn man who spends the entire story learning, one humiliation at a time, that his principles were partly principle and partly vanity.

Her name is Huang Ying — 黄英, Yellow Bloom.

I. The Man Who Would Beggar Himself for a Petal

Ma Zicai (马子才） was a scholar of Shuntian Prefecture, and his family had been respectable for generations. Respectable, in Ma's case, meant land enough to live on and a name worth keeping. What Ma had instead of ambition was a mania. He loved chrysanthemums.

It was not a drawing-room affection. When he heard of a rare cultivar, he had to have it, and distance meant nothing to him: he would travel several hundred li to buy a single plant. Over the years the household funds drained away into the flowerbeds. His walls grew shabby and his purse grew thin, but his garden in autumn was a small wonder — ranked banks of blooms in every color the season could produce, tended with the devotion other men gave their careers.

One day, travelling in search of yet another variety, he fell in with a young man on the road. The stranger was refined, cheerful, and plainly poor; he rode a mule behind an oil-paper cart in which sat a young woman. They got to talking. The young man's surname was Tao, he said, and he and his sister had just fled a quarrel and were looking for somewhere to rent in the countryside. Ma, who loved nothing so much as another chrysanthemum enthusiast, invited them on the spot to come and live on his own land. He had a spare plot and a thatched cottage. Tao thanked him warmly and accepted.

When Ma saw the sister, he understood why the cart had seemed so quietly bright. She was perhaps twenty, beautiful in a composed and unassuming way, and her name was Huang Ying. She, too, her brother said, understood flowers.

Tao walked through Ma's garden and made a remark that would decide all their lives. He said: the cultivars were good, but the way to love a chrysanthemum was not merely to hoard it — it was to grow it, divide it, improve it, and let it multiply. He began the next morning at dawn, pulling up Ma's exhausted stock, taking cuttings, tending the withered plants that Ma had written off as dead. Nothing he touched stayed dead. Even the chrysanthemums he had pulled up and discarded as worthless, when they bloomed in autumn, turned out to be rare and extraordinary varieties.

Ma was astonished. He was also about to receive a proposal that offended everything he believed.

"Brother Ma," Tao said, in effect, "you are not a rich man. My sister and I do not eat for free. Let us grow chrysanthemums for the market. Half the town would buy. We can live by it."

Ma's face closed. He was, by temperament and by class, a man of the eastern fence. To breed and sell chrysanthemums for cash was, in his eyes, a desecration — the recluse's flower turned into a greengrocer's cabbage. He refused, with the particular stiffness of a man who suspects he is being offered a way out of a trap he has chosen to call his home.

Tao did not argue. He smiled, and he and his sister went ahead anyway.

II. The Garden That Became a Business

What happened next Ma watched with the helplessness of a teetotaler whose guests keep producing wine.

The discarded and half-withered chrysanthemums that Ma had thrown onto the refuse heap were gathered up by Tao and Huang Ying. They tended them. The plants revived, divided, flourished. Customers came — first the flower lovers, then the merely fashionable, then buyers from well-to-do households who wanted the best autumn display in the prefecture. Money came back with them. The Taos bought more land. They built sheds and potting houses. Within a year the shabby southern plot Ma had lent them was a thriving nursery; within a few years it was a small estate, with new buildings, a proper courtyard, and its own groves and vegetable fields.

Ma's own half of the property, meanwhile, remained what it had always been: a little poor, a little proud, and increasingly impossible to distinguish from genteel collapse.

He did his best not to touch the money. He would not accept gifts of cash from Tao. But he was a guest at his neighbors' table every day, and Huang Ying — who kept the household accounts and ran the works with a calm competence that made the whole enterprise look effortless — saw to it that he did not starve on principle. Fine food arrived. Worn things were replaced. Ma, who had resolved to take nothing, found that he had taken everything short of coin, and that the distinction was becoming harder to explain to himself.

The matchmaker — or rather Tao, acting as brother — then raised the obvious subject. Huang Ying was of age; Ma was a widower; they lived a wall apart and shared a life. Why not marry? Ma agreed, but he insisted on terms. He would not, he said, move into the Tao household and live as a kept man. Huang Ying must come to his house and live as a poor scholar's wife. Huang Ying consented. She moved across the wall.

The wall, it turned out, was not a serious defensive structure. She needed tools, stores, a stove, a serving woman; these things lived on her side. Day by day a basket went through the door, a chest was carried over, and before long Ma looked around his austere cottage and found that the wealth had followed his wife through the wall like a cat that refuses to be evicted. He protested. He had the things carried back. They returned. He gave up, in the end, not because he was defeated in argument but because the practical administration of Huang Ying's existence was simply more competent than his philosophy.

Even so, he could not bear the thing the town began to say: that Ma Zicai, for all his fine talk about the eastern fence, owed his house and his table to his wife's flower business. He sulked. He told Huang Ying he would rather be poor for thirty years than be maintained by a woman.

Huang Ying's answer is the moral center of the story, and she delivered it without raising her voice. Why, she asked, should a contented household deliberately choose rags and thin gruel just to perform poverty for the neighbors? I am not corrupting you. I am not asking you to bend your spine to an official. If growing flowers makes us comfortable, and the flowers are beautiful and no one is harmed — whose rule says a recluse must be hungry to be a recluse?^{[3]Huang Ying's retort invokes Tao Yuanming from the opposite direction: she names herself a keeper of the Tao-family legacy and argues that making the recluse's flower pay its way does not violate the recluse's integrity — she even says she is rescuing the reputation of "our family's Magistrate of Pengze" (我家彭泽）, i.e. Tao Yuanming, whom she claims as a kinsman (her surname Tao 陶 is his). The line "the poor wishing to be rich is hard; the rich seeking poverty is easy" (贫者愿富为难，富者求贫甚易） is one of the most quoted reversals in the tale.}

Ma, Pu Songling notes with dryness, had no good reply. He simply could not reconcile himself to it. The couple, in their odd way, lived in two households at once — Ma drifting back to his own poor rooms when his pride flared, and back to Huang Ying when the rooms grew too cold and the table too bare.

And then the brother held a party.

III. The Flower Shop in Jinling

The household prospered, and Tao, whose energy for horticulture was exceeded only by his energy for avoiding the role of respectable brother-in-law, eventually announced that he would travel. There were cultivars in the old southern capital, he said, that could not be had in the north; he would go to Jinling, buy and grow there, and send money home. Huang Ying raised no objection. Ma, who by this time had learned that objections to the Tao family's commercial arrangements were a form of speech that produced no effect, said nothing either.

Tao left. Months passed. Business called Ma south on a journey of his own, and he arrived in Jinling at the height of the chrysanthemum autumn. Passing a flower shop early one morning, he stopped in the street: the benches and pots were massed with blooms of a quality no ordinary nurseryman produced — the particular vigor, the impossible color, the unmistakable hand. His heart leaped. He went in, and the owner who came out from the back of the shop was Tao.

The reunion was joyful. Tao set out wine at once; they talked through the day as though the months had been weeks. But when Ma pressed him to come home, Tao demurred. Jinling, he said, was their old country. He meant to settle there, even to marry there. He had savings; he would send a sum to his sister. Ma, whose position in his own marriage was what it was, argued with unexpected force — the house was full, the garden waited, his sister needed him — and at last, half by affection and half by being physically overborne, Tao let himself be bundled onto the northbound road. He returned to the Shuntian garden, and resumed, with undiminished enthusiasm, the two occupations that defined his days: he grew perfect chrysanthemums, and he drank.

IV. The Drinker by the Flowerbed

Tao liked wine. He had a friend, a scholar named Zeng, who liked it just as much, and the two of them regularly drank together in the garden, among the chrysanthemums, with the happy indiscipline of men who have discovered that they will never be examiners.

On this particular day they had drunk a great deal. Tao rose, already unsteady, saying he would go and rest in the garden. He walked unsteadily down between the flowerbeds, reached the edge of the plot — and collapsed.

Ma, who had watched him go, saw what happened next.

Tao's clothes slipped and pooled on the ground beside him. His body shortened. His limbs drew in. Where the young man had fallen, there stood instead a chrysanthemum about a man's height, crowned all at once with an explosion of flowers, each bloom the size of a fist. The scent poured out over the garden. Beside it lay his discarded clothes, as empty as a shed skin.

Ma was not a stupid man, and for months the facts had been arranged around him like cuttings waiting to root: the family name Tao, the impossible horticulture, the sister named Yellow Bloom, the plants that would not die. He understood now with the clarity of a blow. Tao and Huang Ying were not flower enthusiasts who were exceptionally lucky with flowers. They were chrysanthemum spirits — plant daemons, the kind of being the old books place among the shapeshifting things, only gentler than any fox.^{[4]Plant spirits (花精/花妖） are a recognized category in Chinese strange-tale literature, distinct from fox spirits (狐） and ghosts (鬼）. They are formed, in folk theory, when an old plant absorbs sufficient qi over long years (物老成精； "a thing grown old becomes a spirit"), an idea traceable at least to the Baopuzi and the Tang strange-tale collections. The Liaozhai flower spirits — Ge Jin the peony (《葛巾》), Xiang Yu the purple peony (《香玉》), and Huang Ying the chrysanthemum — are notably gentler and more domestic than the collection's foxes; they manage households and bear children rather than seduce or drain men.}

He panicked. He ran and called Huang Ying.

Huang Ying came. She did not scream or weep. She looked at the towering chrysanthemum that had been her brother, and she did the strangest thing in the story: she scolded it. She pulled up the plant by its roots, carried it back into her own room, and set it on the bed, telling Ma flatly not to stare and not to touch the roots. Then she closed the door.

Ma waited. When they looked again, the tall chrysanthemum on the bed had withered and died. And in its place lay Tao, in his clothes, deeply, drunkenly asleep.

The secret, after that, was no secret. Huang Ying did not deny what they were. She was a flower spirit; her brother was a flower spirit; the wealth was real, the marriage was real, and the flowers in the garden were her kin. Ma, confronted at last with the supernatural truth he had spent years failing to notice, made his decision: he stayed. He did not flee, did not call an exorcist, did not report her to the authorities. He had been out-argued by a flower spirit about money; he was not going to out-argue her about existence.

But the story is not yet done with Tao, or with wine.

V. The Second Fall

Tao's drinking grew worse, not better. At the autumn flower festival he met his friend Zeng again. The two men set to it with the old enthusiasm, cup after cup, until Tao was thoroughly, magnificently drunk. Zeng helped him back toward the garden, and there, beside the chrysanthemum beds, it happened a second time. Tao's clothes fell away; his body gave the same swift inward collapse; and again a chrysanthemum stood where he had stood.

But this time Zeng was present, and Zeng was old and frightened and did not know what Ma had learned. He cried out and, in his alarm, pulled the plant up by the roots himself and carried it away to show people, shouting that the garden had produced a monster.

When Huang Ying arrived, the damage was beyond scolding. The pulled chrysanthemum had already wilted, its leaves drooping, its petals loosening, the roots bare and drying in the open air. She took it up in her arms. She told Ma, quietly, that this was not like the first time. A spirit forced out of its human shape could be coaxed back if the plant body was kept whole and bedded properly; she had done it once by putting him to root in the room and letting the form return. But a chrysanthemum torn up and left to die while drunk — its transformation run out of season, its roots exposed — that death did not reverse.

She buried the plant body with ceremony in the garden.

From its roots, the following spring, a chrysanthemum grew. It was shorter than the one Tao had become. Its petals had a faint, dry, wine-like scent when you crushed them, and when the autumn wind blew through it, the stems swayed with a slight, unsteady motion, like a man making his way home late from a party. Huang Ying tended it as her brother's grave and her brother's continuation, both at once. The townspeople who bought cuttings from it called the variety, simply, the Drunk Tao (醉陶）, and it bloomed reliably every year thereafter — a flower that could not, in any soil, be kept from its cups.

VI. What the Flower Spirit Won

Ma expected, after all this, that the revelation would end the marriage. Spirit wives in the old tales so often depart when discovered, melting into the wall or vanishing with the dawn, their humanity a loan that knowledge calls due.

Huang Ying did not depart. She kept the books, kept the garden, kept the house, and kept Ma. In time she bore him children — ordinary, living children, who grew and married. The strange household became, by the simple passage of years, an ordinary one distinguished chiefly by the finest chrysanthemums in the prefecture and a peculiar pale-gold cultivar in the garden that smelled faintly of wine. Ma lived to old age. Huang Ying showed no sign of aging at all, but by then this was a private fact between them, not a scandal. He had begun as a man who would not sell a single bloom to save his household, and he ended as a man who died well-fed, well-loved, and entirely supported by the flower trade he had called sacrilege.

Pu Songling appends one of his characteristic "Historian of the Strange" comments, and for once the joke is turned fully toward his own class. The gist of it: the world despises the kind of man who lives off his wife, and Ma was thoroughly ashamed of being that man. But consider the chrysanthemums. The western ground produced them, and in a few years they supported the household; so the family did not, in the end, depend on the wife's money at all — it depended on the flowers. Why begrudge a man a wife who is a blossom of the immortal kind? And as for Huang Ying herself — why, she is a Tao (the word means "the Way" as well as being the surname): for a hundred years she set fine wine and good food before the scholar, and where in the empire would you find a hundred years of such a marriage?^{[5]Pu Songling signs his authorial comments "The Historian of the Strange" (异史氏曰）, in deliberate imitation of Sima Qian's "The Grand Astrologer says" (太史公曰） in the Records of the Grand Historian. In the Huang Ying comment he notes that the townsfolk despise a man "fed by his wife's sash" (裙带而食）, but observes that the wealth actually grew from the flowers of the western garden rather than from Huang Ying herself, and ends by punning on Tao 陶/the Way 道 and praising a hundred-year marriage of good wine and fine food — a comic benediction on commerce, marriage, and longevity.}

It is an astonishing sentence to find in a collection famous for ghosts and gore. Pu Songling, the failed examination candidate who lived much of his life on other men's patronage, quietly rules that the ideology of proud poverty had been using virtue as a mask for snobbery. Tao Yuanming picked chrysanthemums and refused to bow; nothing in his example required his successors to starve. Huang Ying's heresy was only this: she refused to accept that beauty must be useless, or that a clean conscience requires an empty stomach. Ma spent the story guarding a boundary — between the recluse and the merchant, between the flower as emblem and the flower as goods, between "my" poverty and "her" wealth. The flower spirits simply grew across all three boundaries, roots first, and the boundaries dissolved into a garden.

The last image worth keeping is not Tao's death. It is the Drunk Tao cultivar itself, the plant that grew from a spirit's grave and would not stop blooming, or drinking, in any soil. In old China the chrysanthemum was praised above all for "keeping its integrity in the cold of the year" — 黄花晚节, the late-autumn integrity that a gentleman was meant to preserve into old age.^{[6]黄花晚节 (huánghuā wǎnjié, "the yellow flower's integrity in the late season") is a standing metaphor, built on Han Qi's (韩琦， 1008–1075) line praising the chrysanthemum as the flower that alone holds its bloom into the year's cold end. A gentleman's 晚节 — his conduct, especially his integrity, in old age — was conventionally compared to it. Pu Songling's "Drunk Tao" cultivar (醉陶）, which keeps blooming splendidly while being perpetually intoxicated, is a playful variation: integrity preserved not in stern abstinence but in cheerful, unkillable excess.} Pu Songling plants his own joke inside that grave metaphor: here is a flower that preserves its integrity while falling-down drunk, sells itself in the marketplace without losing its scent, and answers to the name of the Way. The reader can decide which kind of integrity is harder.

Retelling by Cathay Tales. Source: 《聊斋志异》卷十一·黄英 (Pu Songling, c. 1680s; first printed in the 1766 Zhu family woodblock edition). Botanical, literary, and social notes drawn from standard commentaries and from the chrysanthemum culture of the lower Yangzi and Beijing regions in the early Qing.

Translator's Note

I have kept the retelling's spine exactly as Pu Songling laid it, but readers coming to this story for a haunting should be warned: there is no haunting in it at all, unless you count the embarrassment. The supernatural machinery — a man who turns into a flower — is used not for horror but as the engine of a comedy about class and money. Huang Ying is one of Pu Songling's most thoroughly admirable women: she never pleads, never vanishes, and wins every argument by simply continuing to exist and to garden. I would trust her with my accounts.

— Wang Cai

Related Tales

If you enjoyed this story, you might also like:

• The Peony Sisters Who Vanished Into Their Roots — the other great Liaozhai flower-spirit marriage, where doubt destroys what commerce could not
• The Scholar Whose Love Brought a Flower Back From the Dead — a white peony, a red camellia, and a love that outlasts the root
• The Fox Wife Whose Pranks Cured a Fool — a Liaozhai shapeshifter who fixes a family and then leaves
• The Spendthrift Who Almost Became an Immortal — another Qing comic tale of money, morals, and the path not taken