The Peony Sisters Who Vanished Into Their Roots / 葛巾

A scholar from Luoyang, two sisters who walked out of a peony garden, and the question that should never have been asked

From Liaozhai Zhiyi (聊斋志异 · Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio), Volume X

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

Before You Begin

There is a particular kind of story that Pu Songling tells better than anyone else who ever wrote in Chinese, and it is not the ghost story. It is the story of a person who has everything and loses it because of one small, ordinary, human flaw — a flaw that the reader can feel stirring in themselves before they even notice it on the page.

Ge Jin (葛巾) is that kind of story.

It is about a man who loves peonies so much that he travels from Luoyang — the city where peonies are the civic religion — to Caozhou, five days east, because someone told him the garden there had blooms you could not find anywhere else. In the garden he meets a woman. He marries her. She gives him a son. She brings her sister to marry his brother. They are happy for two years. And then, because he cannot stop wondering who she really is, he makes the journey back to Caozhou to ask.

Pu Songling does not write this as a monster story. The woman is not a predator. She does not drain his life force, lure him to his death, or trick him out of his fortune. She loves him. She is faithful. She runs his household, raises his child, and makes his family richer and happier than they have ever been. The only thing she does not do is answer the question he eventually cannot stop asking.

And when he asks it — not directly, but by going behind her back to investigate — the answer destroys everything.

The two main figures:

• Chang Dayong (常大用): a young scholar from Luoyang. His family is not wealthy, but they are respectable. His defining trait is not courage or cleverness but obsession. He is the kind of man who will travel hundreds of li to look at a flower. In Pu Songling's world, this kind of single-mindedness is what makes him visible to the beings who live in the garden.
• Ge Jin (葛巾): the peony spirit. She is the spirit of a cultivar called 葛巾紫 (Gejin Zi — "Ge-Jin Purple"), one of the most famous peonies in Caozhou. She walks at night as a woman in a purple dress. She is direct, practical, and entirely without the coyness that Pu Songling usually gives to his female spirits. When she decides she wants Chang, she goes to his room. When she decides to leave, she does not linger.

There is a third figure who matters:

• Yu Ban (玉版): Ge Jin's younger sister, the spirit of 玉版白 (Yuban Bai — "Jade-Tablet White"), another Caozhou peony. She is quieter than her sister. She marries Chang's younger brother, Chang Daqi (常大器), and bears him a son as well. She has fewer lines in the story, but she is the one who makes the ending unbearable — because when Ge Jin decides to leave, Yu Ban follows without hesitation, holding her own child, and neither of them looks back.

A note on the title. 葛巾 (gejin) literally means "kudzu-fibre headcloth" — the rough linen wrap worn by commoners and recluses. As a peony name, it refers to the colour of the petals: a deep, muted purple, the colour of undyed kudzu cloth. 玉版 (yuban) is "jade tablet," referring to the thick, pure white petals that resemble polished jade. Both are real peony cultivars that still exist in Chinese horticulture. Pu Songling chose them carefully: the purple one and the white one, the bold one and the quiet one, the sister who initiates and the sister who follows.

The Garden at Caozhou

Chang Dayong had loved peonies since he was a boy. In Luoyang, this was not unusual — the city had been famous for peonies since the Tang dynasty, and every spring the wealthy families opened their gardens so that the public could walk through rows of blooms that were taller than a man and wider across than a cartwheel. But Chang's love was not the casual appreciation of a spring tourist. It was a scholar's love: he read the old peony manuals, collected root stock, and kept a notebook in which he recorded the names and lineages of every cultivar he had ever seen.

When a merchant told him that the garden of the Zhu family in Caozhou held peonies that could not be found in Luoyang — rare purple and white varieties that had been bred over three generations and never sold — Chang packed his books, told his younger brother Daqi to look after the house, and set off east.

The garden was larger than he expected. It lay behind a high wall on the eastern edge of the city, and when the caretaker let him in — for a small fee, with a warning not to touch the plants — Chang walked through rows of peonies that were just beginning to bloom. It was early spring, and most of the buds were still closed, but a few had opened: deep reds, pale pinks, a yellow cultivar he had only read about. And at the far end of the garden, set apart from the others, was a double row of plants he did not recognise — one row with buds the colour of dark wine, the other with buds the colour of snow.

He was standing there, making notes, when he heard footsteps on the path behind him.

He turned. A young woman was walking toward him with an old servant. The woman wore a purple dress. She was not looking at him — she was looking at the peonies, the way Chang looked at them, with the focused attention of someone who knew exactly what she was seeing. She stopped at the row of purple buds and touched one very gently with her fingertip.

Chang could not speak. He had never seen a woman move like that — as if the garden were hers and she was simply checking on something that belonged to her. The old servant noticed him and said, sharply, that the garden was closed to visitors and he should leave. Chang apologised and went.

He could not stop thinking about her.

The Sickness

He found lodging nearby and went back to the garden the next day, and the day after. He saw her again — once, from a distance, walking the same row of purple peonies — but the old servant was with her and she did not look at him. He asked the caretaker who she was. The caretaker said her name was Wei — she was from a branch of the Wei family that had lived in Caozhou for generations. The old servant was called Mother Sang. They did not encourage visitors.

Chang stopped eating. He could not sleep. He lay in his room at the inn and thought about the purple dress and the way she had touched the bud, and after three days he was genuinely ill — feverish, weak, unable to keep down rice water. The innkeeper sent for a doctor, but the doctor said there was nothing physically wrong with him that medicine could fix.

On the fourth night, the door of his room opened and the old servant came in. She was carrying a bowl.

She did not introduce herself. She set the bowl on the table and said: My mistress saw you in the garden. She says you are making yourself sick over nothing. Drink this.

Chang asked what it was.

It is peony-root decoction, she said. My mistress makes it herself. It will bring down the fever. Whether it cures the rest of it is not my concern.

He drank it. It was bitter and slightly sweet, and he fell asleep almost immediately. When he woke in the morning, the fever was gone. The bowl was still on the table, and in the bottom of it was a single purple petal.

He went back to the garden that evening. She was waiting for him.

Ge Jin

She did not play games with him. She sat on the stone bench beside the purple peony row and told him, without preamble, that she had seen him in the garden and that she was willing to come to him that night, if he wanted her to.

Chang said yes before she finished the sentence.

She came to the inn after dark. She was direct and unashamed in a way that startled him — not aggressive, but entirely without the modesty and hesitation that a well-bred young woman was supposed to perform. She asked him questions about Luoyang, about his family, about his brother. She told him almost nothing about herself except that her name was Ge Jin, that she lived with her younger sister Yu Ban, and that the old woman Sang was their guardian.

They spent three nights together. On the fourth night, she gave him a packet of silver — enough, she said, to pay his debts and travel home.

Go back to Luoyang, she said. I will come to you.

Chang asked when.

Before the peonies in your own garden finish blooming, she said.

He went home.

Luoyang

She arrived eleven days later, in a plain covered cart, with Mother Sang and a single trunk. She did not explain how she had travelled or why she had no escort. She simply walked into the Chang household as if she belonged there, and within a week she had reorganised the kitchen, settled the family's outstanding accounts with the silver she had brought, and planted a row of peony tubers along the south wall of the courtyard.

Chang's brother Daqi was astonished — not just by her beauty, but by her competence. She was, he told Chang privately, the most capable person who had ever lived in their house.

Ge Jin was, by any measure, an extraordinary wife. She managed the household with quiet precision. She was generous to the servants and respectful to the neighbours. She could recite poetry and discuss the classics with Chang in a way that made him feel, for the first time in his life, that he was talking to someone as intelligent as he was. And she was, he noted with some wonder, entirely devoted to him.

A month after her arrival, she raised the subject of her sister.

Yu Ban is alone in Caozhou, she said. She is twenty years old and she has no one. Your brother is unmarried. It would be good for both of them.

Chang was cautious. Daqi was a steady, unremarkable young man — not a scholar, not ambitious, but kind and reliable. Yu Ban, from what Ge Jin had told him, was beautiful and accomplished. Would such a woman consent to marry a man like Daqi?

She will consent, Ge Jin said. I have already asked her.

Yu Ban arrived two weeks later, in another cart, with another trunk. She was quieter than her sister — pale, dark-haired, with a stillness that made her seem, even in a crowded room, like someone standing at the edge of a forest. She looked at Daqi once, nodded almost imperceptibly, and the marriage was arranged.

The two brothers and the two sisters lived together in the Chang house in Luoyang for just under two years. Ge Jin gave birth to a son. They named him Yulian (玉莲 — "Jade Lotus"). Six months later, Yu Ban gave birth to a son as well. Both children were strong and beautiful. The household was prosperous. The peonies Ge Jin had planted along the south wall bloomed in colours that no one in Luoyang had ever seen — a deep purple that was almost black at the centre, and a pure white that seemed to glow in moonlight.

People came from other districts to see them. Chang turned away offers of money for cuttings. He was, he told everyone, the happiest man in Luoyang.

He should have left it at that.

The Return to Caozhou

It started with a small thing. Ge Jin never spoke about her past. She never mentioned parents, relatives, or the Wei family she had claimed to belong to. When Chang asked — gently, casually — she deflected the question with a smile or a change of subject. After a year, he stopped asking. But the silence stayed with him, the way a stone stays in a shoe.

The silver she had given him in Caozhou was still in the house — he had not spent all of it. One day, he took a piece to a silversmith in the market to have it assessed. The silversmith turned it over and over and said that he had never seen silver like it — the alloy was wrong, the stamp was unfamiliar, it was not official silver from any mint he recognised. It was, he said, beautiful work, but he could not say where it came from.

Chang did not confront Ge Jin. Instead, he told her he had business in the east — a matter of some old books he had ordered — and he set off for Caozhou.

The garden was the same. The wall was the same. The peonies were in bloom. But when he found the old caretaker and asked about the Wei family — about the young woman named Ge Jin who had lived there — the caretaker looked at him strangely.

There is no Wei family here, he said.

Chang described Ge Jin. The purple dress. The old servant Sang. The double row of purple and white peonies at the far end of the garden.

The caretaker was quiet for a long time. Then he said: You have seen the flowers.

He led Chang to the far end of the garden, to the double row he remembered. The purple peonies were in full bloom — enormous, dark, velvety flowers, each one the size of a bowl. Beside them were the white ones, thick-petalled and luminous.

These two cultivars, the caretaker said, have been in this garden for more than a hundred years. The purple one is called Ge Jin Zi. The white one is called Yu Ban Bai. They are the finest peonies in Caozhou. No one planted them. No one knows where they came from. They were already here when my grandfather's grandfather was caretaker.

He paused.

People say that on certain nights, when the moon is right, you can see two women walking here. One in purple. One in white. They walk the rows and touch the buds, the way a gardener touches his own plants. They never speak to anyone. If you approach them, they are gone before you get close.

He looked at Chang.

You met one of them, didn't you?

Chang did not answer. He stood in front of the purple peony and looked at it — really looked at it, the way he had looked at peonies his whole life, with the scholar's attention to detail. And he saw that the petals were exactly the colour of her dress. Exactly.

The Question

He rode back to Luoyang in three days. He did not sleep. He did not eat. When he walked into the courtyard, Ge Jin was standing by the south wall, holding their son. The purple peonies were blooming there too — the ones she had planted the day she arrived.

She looked at him and she knew.

She did not ask him where he had been. She did not ask what he had found. She simply looked at his face and whatever she saw there told her everything.

She called Yu Ban.

Yu Ban came out of the house holding her own child. The two sisters stood together in the courtyard, between the purple peonies and the white ones, and Ge Jin spoke.

Her voice was steady. She said: I came to you because you loved flowers. I thought a man who loved flowers as you do would be capable of loving something without needing to own its history. I was wrong.

She did not raise her voice. She did not cry. She said: For two years I was your wife. I managed your house. I bore your son. I was faithful to you. I would have stayed until you died, and then I would have gone back to the garden, and the peonies would have remembered you. But you could not let it be enough.

Chang tried to speak. He could not.

Ge Jin looked at Yu Ban. Yu Ban nodded.

They did not vanish in a clap of thunder or a cloud of smoke. They simply turned toward the peony beds and began to walk — not away, but down, as if the ground were soft and they were stepping into water. Chang lunged forward to grab her, but his hands closed on empty air. The two women, each holding her child, sank into the earth between the flower rows. Where they had stood, two shoots immediately pushed through the soil — one purple, one white — growing so fast that Chang could see them move. By the time Daqi came running from the house, the shoots were knee-high. By nightfall they were as tall as the other peonies, in full bloom, enormous and perfect and completely silent.

The children were gone with them.

Aftermath

The two peonies in the Chang courtyard became famous. They were, everyone agreed, the most beautiful peonies in Luoyang — which meant the most beautiful in the empire. The purple one produced flowers of a depth and richness that no cultivar could match. The white one was so luminous that it seemed to light the courtyard on moonless nights.

Cuttings were taken. The purple cultivar was named Ge Jin, after the woman who had planted it. The white one was named Yu Ban. Both names survive in Chinese horticulture to this day.

Chang never remarried. He lived in the house with his brother and sister-in-law's absence — for Daqi never remarried either — and tended the peonies. The plants thrived. They never produced children again. Pu Songling does not say whether Chang ever spoke to them, or whether, on certain nights, he saw two women walking between the rows.

What he does say — in the author's commentary that follows the tale — is this:

When a person meets a being of a different kind, and that being treats them with kindness and fidelity, the only correct response is to accept it. To investigate, to dig, to demand a name and a lineage and a place of origin — this is not love. This is ownership. And ownership is the thing that the beings in the garden will never tolerate. Chang's tragedy was not that he married a peony. It was that he could not be happy without understanding her. He loved the flower, but he did not trust it. And the flower, which is honest in a way that human beings are not, left.

Pu Songling has one more line. He writes:

All the sorrow in the world comes from suspicion. If Chang had never gone back to Caozhou, the two sisters would still be walking in that courtyard. But he could not help it. He was a scholar. He wanted to know. And knowing, as it always does, killed the thing he loved.

Afterword — On the Difference Between Loving and Knowing

There is a question that hangs over every story Pu Songling wrote about humans and spirits, and it is this: how much do you have the right to know about the person you love?

In most of the Western folk tradition, the answer is built into the plot. The husband who marries a swan maiden or a seal woman is told, explicitly, that he must not look at her when she takes her animal form. He looks. She leaves. The moral is about forbidden knowledge — there is a line you must not cross.

Pu Songling does something different. In Ge Jin, there is no prohibition. Ge Jin never says "do not ask about my past." She never says "do not go to Caozhou." She simply assumes — wrongly — that a man who loves peonies enough to travel five days to see them will understand that some things are to be loved without being inspected. Her mistake is not that she sets a rule and he breaks it. Her mistake is that she assumes he already knows what she never thought to tell him.

This is what makes the story so painful. Chang is not a bad man. He is not cruel. He is curious — the same curiosity that made him a good peony scholar, the same quality that drove him to Caozhou in the first place. He loves his wife. He is grateful to her. He is happy. But he cannot stop the part of his mind that asks: where did she come from? What is the silver? Who is the Wei family? And when he acts on that curiosity — not out of malice, but out of the ordinary, irrepressible human need to resolve a mystery — he destroys the thing that made him happy.

Pu Songling's commentary is unusually direct for him. He does not hide behind a joke or a paradox. He says it plainly: the problem was suspicion. Not rational inquiry, not due diligence, not sensible caution — suspicion: the inability to accept a gift without examining it for strings.

There is a horticultural metaphor buried in the story that is easy to miss. When Chang first sees Ge Jin in the garden, she is touching a peony bud "very gently, with her fingertip." That is how a gardener touches a plant — not to possess it, but to check it, to feel whether it is healthy, to acknowledge it. It is a gesture of attention, not ownership. Chang, standing a few feet away, is also a man who knows flowers — he has spent his whole life studying them, cataloguing them, travelling to see them. But his relationship to flowers is different from hers. He wants to identify them. He wants to know their names and their lineages. He wants to put them in his notebook.

She is the flower. He is the botanist. The botanist can love the flower — genuinely, deeply — but he cannot stop dissecting it. And a dissected flower does not grow.

The two children vanish with their mothers. Pu Songling does not sentimentalise this. He does not leave them behind as consolation prizes. The boys were half-flower, and when the flowers returned to the earth, the children went with them. There is no workaround, no loophole, no last-minute exception. The equation is absolute: love that requires full knowledge is love that the flower cannot survive, and the fruit of that love goes with the flower.

The peonies that remain are beautiful. They are, in fact, the most beautiful peonies in the world. But they are just flowers. They do not speak. They do not manage a household. They do not hold a child. They are the residue of what Chang destroyed — gorgeous, silent, and rooted in the exact spot where the woman he loved sank into the ground because he could not stop asking who she was.

The last line of Pu Songling's commentary is worth reading slowly: to know it is to kill it. It is the most uncompromising thing Pu Songling ever said about love, and it is the reason Ge Jin is still read, three hundred years later, by people who have never grown a peony in their lives.

Retelling by Cathay Tales. Source: 《聊斋志异》卷十·葛巾 (Pu Songling, c. 1680, edited woodblock edition of 1766). Horticultural notes on Ge Jin Zi and Yu Ban Bai cultivars, Caozhou peony culture, and Qing-dynasty scholar travel customs drawn from standard commentaries. The cultivars Ge Jin Zi and Yu Ban Bai remain in cultivation in Shandong province.

Translator's Note

This story is one of the quietest and most devastating things Pu Songling ever wrote. There is no monster, no violence, no haunting — only a man who could not leave well enough alone. Every time I read it I think Chang was wrong, and every time I suspect I would do exactly the same thing. That is Pu Songling's genius: he makes you see yourself in the person who destroys everything.

— Wang Cai

Related Tales

If you enjoyed this story, you might also like:

• The Scholar Whose Love Brought a Flower Back From the Dead — another Liaozhai flower-spirit story, about a white peony and the red camellia that stayed
• The Fox Wife Whose Pranks Cured a Fool — a Liaozhai retelling about a fox wife who fixes a family and then leaves
• The Fox Bride and the Stolen Cup — a fox-spirit marriage that ends differently
• The Two-Hundred-Year-Old Fox Who Refused to Seduce — a Qing tale about a spirit who chose virtue over instinct
• The Young Monk Who Could Not Forget the Tiger — a story about the thing you cannot let go of