The Scholar Whose Love Brought a Flower Back From the Dead / 香玉

A young scholar, a white peony that walked as a woman, and the red camellia that stayed when the white flower died

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

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

Before You Begin

There is a set of stories inside Liaozhai that Pu Songling returns to more than any other: a scholar lodges in a temple or a country house. A beautiful woman comes to his room after dark. They talk, they love, they spend the night. And every morning before dawn she rises, dresses, and leaves — without fail, without explanation, without ever staying until the light.

Sometimes she is a fox. Sometimes she is a ghost. Sometimes, as in this story, she is something Pu Songling does not quite name for several pages: a flower spirit, 花妖 (huā yāo), which in his usage is neither fox nor ghost but a third category — a plant that has accumulated enough of the world's 灵气 (líng qì) — its vital breath — over enough years to take human form at night and return to its root before morning.

Xiangyu (香玉 — "Fragrant Jade") is the longest and most intricate flower-spirit story in the entire collection. It is also, in my reading, the one where Pu Songling is most interested in a question he never asks anywhere else: what happens to the person left behind when a flower dies?

The answer, in this story, turns out to be: a red camellia named Jiangxue (绛雪 — "Crimson Snow"). She is Xiangyu's sworn sister, the spirit of a camellia tree that has grown beside the white peony for a century. She is not the love interest. She is something more interesting: the friend who stays when the beloved is gone.

The three main figures:

• Huang Shenglai (黄生): a young scholar from a minor gentry family. He has come to lodge in the Bodhi Temple (Bodhisattva Monastery) on the southern slope of Mount Lao (崂山), near the coast of Shandong province, to study in the quiet. He is clever, romantic, and — this matters for what follows — someone who will dig a dead flower's stump out of the earth and water it with his own tears every day for weeks.
• Xiangyu (香玉): the spirit of a white peony (mudan, 牡丹) growing in the temple garden. She has been a plant for over a hundred years. At night she walks as a young woman of extraordinary beauty. She is passionate, direct, and unafraid. She chooses Huang — not the other way around.
• Jiangxue (绛雪): the spirit of a red camellia (cha, 茶) growing beside the white peony. She is described as 冷 — cool, reserved, somewhat melancholy. She has watched Xiangyu and Huang from the garden for an entire season. When Xiangyu dies, it is Jiangxue who goes to tell Huang. It is Jiangxue who stays with him for the months it takes to bring the peony back. She asks for nothing in return.

The Story

The Girl in the Temple Garden

Huang Shenglai arrived at the Bodhi Temple on Mount Lao in the autumn of his twenty-second year. He had arranged to lodge there for the winter examination season — the temple had rooms for scholars, and the abbot, an old man named Fang, was accustomed to the arrangement. The rent was modest. The temple was quiet. The mountain air, Huang wrote later in a letter that Pu Songling quotes directly, was "cold enough to sharpen the mind and clean enough to shame a city."

The temple had a garden. In the garden, beside a stone wall near the eastern corridor, grew a white peony — a mudan of exceptional size. Huang noticed it on his second day: the plant stood roughly eight feet tall, with leaves the color of wet jade and a crown of unopened buds that were each the size of a man's fist. It had, the abbot told him, been growing in that spot for over a hundred years. Every spring it bloomed — but nobody in living memory had seen a blossom like it. The flowers, when they came, were the purest white anyone had ever seen in a peony. They lasted only three days, and then the petals fell, and the garden smelled, for one afternoon, of something the old monks had a name for but never said aloud.

Huang, who was twenty-two and in the habit of falling in love with anything beautiful, wrote a poem about the peony. He left the poem on the stone wall beside it.

That night, a girl knocked on his door.

She was, in his description, roughly eighteen. She wore a white dress. Her face, he wrote, was like the peony — but Pu Songling is careful to note that Huang said this only after the girl had already left, when he was sitting in the dark trying to understand what had just happened to him. At the time he could not make the comparison. The comparison came later. It came because something in the girl's bearing — the way she held her head, the stillness of her hands, the faint scent she left in the room after she was gone — reminded him of the garden and he made the connection himself.

She introduced herself as Xiangyu. She said she was the daughter of a scholar who had died, and that she was living with a distant relative near the temple. She said she had seen his poem. She said she wanted to tell him, in person, that his poem was not good.

He was so startled that he laughed. She laughed too. Then she sat down across from him. They talked until the fourth watch — that is, until roughly two or three in the morning — and then she stood, said she had to leave, and walked out the door.

She came back the next night. And the night after.

The Routine

For three weeks, Huang wrote, Xiangyu came to his room every night after the tenth watch (roughly 10 p.m.) and left before the fifth watch (roughly 4 a.m.). She never stayed past dawn. She never entered the garden during daylight — at least, not while he was awake to see her. She never explained where she went.

He asked her once. She said: I have a place I must be. If I am not there before the sun, I will be harmed.

He did not understand. He was twenty-two. He asked if she was afraid of someone. She said: No. I am afraid of the light.

He took this to be a figure of speech. In his family, in his part of Shandong, there were girls who had reason to hide — daughters of fallen officials, widows whose in-laws were cruel, runaways. He assumed she was one of these. He did not press her. He was, Pu Songling notes, unusually patient for a young man in this situation.

What he noticed — and this is what changes the story — was that after she left each morning, the white peony in the garden looked slightly different. The buds were opening faster. The scent in the garden was stronger. One morning, the fourth week, he walked to the peony at dawn — as soon as she had left — and found that three of the largest buds had opened overnight. The flowers were white. Not white the way people say something is white. White the way a room is white when you have nothing else in it and the light comes in and there is only light.

He stood there for a long time.

Then he went back to his room and wrote a second poem. This poem, which Pu Songling quotes in full, is one of the few moments in Liaozhai where the verse is not ornamental. It is functional. It is the moment the scholar realizes what he has been sleeping with. The last couplet reads — and I am keeping the ambiguity of the original — something close to:

I thought I was writing about a flower. The flower was writing about me.

Jiangxue

On the night after the blooming, a second girl came to his door.

She was not Xiangyu. She was slightly older, perhaps twenty, and wore a red dress. Her face was beautiful in a different way — not soft, not approachable. She had, Huang wrote, 霜雪之容 — a face like frost and snow. It was not a compliment. It meant: beautiful and untouchable.

She introduced herself as Jiangxue. She said she was Xiangyu's sworn sister. She said she had come to deliver a warning.

The warning was this: Do not try to find where we go in the daytime. Do not follow us. Do not dig in the garden to see what you think you will find. If you do these things, you will kill her.

He stared at her.

She said: She trusts you. I do not. I am telling you this because if you kill her, you will kill the only beautiful thing on this mountain, and I have lived beside it for a hundred years and I will not watch a scholar end it for curiosity.

Then she left.

Huang sat in the dark for the rest of the night. He did not sleep. When Xiangyu came the following evening, he asked her directly: Are you the peony?

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said: Yes.

He asked: And Jiangxue?

She said: The camellia. The red one. Beside me.

He asked: How long?

She said: A hundred and twelve years. She was there before I was planted. She will be there after I am gone.

He asked: Why did you come to me?

She looked at him. She said: Because you wrote a poem. And because the camellia — she is my sister, but she does not understand why a poem would matter. You wrote something true. I could feel it in the root. That is how I knew you were the one.

That night, for the first time, she stayed past dawn. She stayed until the light actually came into the room. She told him afterward that it was the first time in a hundred and twelve years she had let the sun find her in a human room.

The Digging

Three months passed.

Then one morning in early spring, Huang came back from the market and found the garden in an uproar. A man — a local landowner from a village on the other side of the mountain — had come with four laborers and was digging up the white peony. He had decided, he told the abbot, that the plant belonged to his family's ancestral land (the temple's garden, it turned out, sat on a boundary that had been disputed for a century) and that he was within his rights to transplant it.

The abbot protested. The man shouted. The laborers dug.

By the time Huang reached the garden, the peony was out of the ground. The root ball — a mass of pale tendrils thicker than a man's arm — had been split in half by a spade. The plant lay on its side on the stone path. The roots were the color of bone.

Xiangyu was not there. She had, Huang realized, been inside the plant when it was cut.

That night she did not come to his room.

The next night she did not come.

The third night, Jiangxue came. She was weeping. Huang had never seen her weep.

She said: She is gone. The root was cut through the heart. She could not survive it. She appeared to me this afternoon — for the last time — and said to tell you.

He asked: Where is she now?

Jiangxue said: She is a ghost. She is standing in the room next to yours. She cannot enter because you have not invited her. She says you must invite her by name.

He sat in the dark. He said, quietly: Xiangyu. Come in.

The door opened. She walked in. She was translucent. He could see the wall through her dress. She looked exactly as she had the first night — eighteen, white dress, hair down — but she was not entirely there. She was, he said, like a painting held up against the light: you could see the brushstrokes, but you could also see through them.

She sat across from him. She said: I am a ghost now. The root is cut. I cannot go back to the body. But there is something you can do.

He said: Tell me.

She said: You must find where I grew. Dig up the remaining root — every tendril, even the ones that are brown and dead-looking. Take it to the north slope of the mountain, to the place where the stream comes down through the rocks. Bury the root there, three feet deep. Cover it with earth mixed with the ash of three specific things: cypress wood, lotus seed shell, and the paper on which you wrote your second poem. Burn the poem first. Mix its ash with the earth. Then water the spot every morning with clean water for forty-nine days.

He asked: And then?

She said: I will come back. Not as I was. As a bud. A new shoot. But I will be me. I will remember everything.

She looked at Jiangxue, who was standing by the door.

She said: She will stay with you while you do this. She has offered.

Jiangxue said nothing. She nodded once.

Xiangyu turned back to Huang. She said: It will take forty-nine days. I will be a ghost for forty-nine days. During that time I can be in your room but I cannot touch you. I cannot feel the water or the cloth or your hand. I can see you. I can talk to you. I cannot be held.

He said: I will do it.

She said: Do not fail. If you fail, I will dissolve. A ghost without a root dissolves after the forty-ninth day. I will not come back at all.

She stood. She walked to the door. Before she left, she turned around and said one more thing:

The poem you wrote — the one about the flower writing about you — burn it carefully. Do not crumple it. Let it burn flat. The ash has to be whole.

The Forty-Nine Days

Huang did what she said.

He found the spot in the garden where the peony had stood. He dug out every fragment of root — it took him three days, because the root system went deeper than anyone had known, down through the temple's foundation stones and into the mountain itself. Some of the tendrils were as thin as thread and brown and dead-looking, but he gathered every one of them.

He carried the root mass to the north slope. He found the stream. He buried the root three feet deep in earth mixed with cypress ash and lotus-seed-shell ash. He burned the poem — carefully, letting it burn flat on a stone, watching every character turn to grey — and mixed the ash into the earth.

Then he began the forty-nine days of watering.

Every morning, before dawn, he walked to the stream, filled a clay jar, and carried it to the burial spot. He poured the water slowly. He talked to the ground while he did it.

Jiangxue stayed.

She came to his room every night — not through the door, Pu Songling specifies, but through the wall. She said she could not enter through a door because she was still a plant; she was not, like Xiangyu, a ghost who had been a plant. She was a plant who had never fully left the body. She could project herself as a woman, but she was, she said, 根在此 — "my root is here." She was a camellia still rooted in the garden soil. She could only come to him at night because the camellia, too, was sleeping at night. During the day she was a tree.

She sat with him. She talked to him about Xiangyu — about what Xiangyu had been like as a sapling, about the first time the peony had spoken to her (Xiangyu had been forty years old, Jiangxue said; she had woken up one morning and said "Can you hear me?" and Jiangxue had said "I have always been able to hear you"), about what it was like to be a plant for a century.

He asked her once: Are you in love with me?

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said: No. I am in love with her. I have been in love with her for a hundred years. I am doing this because she asked me to.

He did not ask again.

On the eighteenth day, a green shoot appeared at the burial site. It was the size of a needle. Huang almost missed it.

On the thirtieth day, the shoot was six inches tall. It had three leaves. The leaves were the color of jade.

On the forty-second day, a single bud appeared at the top. It was white. It was the size of a child's thumb.

Jiangxue, who came to visit the site with him that evening, stood beside the bud for a long time without speaking. Then she said: She is coming back. I can feel her in the root.

On the forty-ninth day, the bud opened.

The flower was white. Not the tentative white of a new bloom. The absolute white of a room full of light. The garden smelled, for one afternoon, of something the old monks had a name for but never said aloud.

That night, Xiangyu knocked on his door.

She was solid. She was warm. She walked in and sat down across from him and said: You did it.

He could not speak.

She reached across the table and took his hand. He said later that her hand felt like it felt the first time — warm, alive, real. But there was a difference. She was, he said, slightly lighter. As though some part of her had stayed in the ground and would always stay there. She was not the girl who had come to him on that first autumn night. She was the same girl who had come back from being dead.

The Camellia

Three years later, the camellia in the temple garden began to sicken.

No one had dug it up. No one had harmed it. The root, Jiangxue said, had simply reached the end of its time. A hundred and fifteen years, she said, was a long life for a camellia. She had been old when Xiangyu was young.

She told Huang one evening, sitting in his room as she had sat for three years, that she would not come back this time. There was no one to dig up her root and perform a ritual. Xiangyu could not do it, because Xiangyu was now a living plant again and could not leave the soil. Huang could not do it, because he was a scholar, not a spirit, and had no way of knowing where her root ended and the mountain began.

He asked: What happens to you?

She said: I become wood. Good wood. The temple will use me for a beam, or a doorframe, or a table. I will be inside the temple for another hundred years. I will be useful.

She stood. She walked to the door. She turned.

She said: Tell her I am not gone. Tell her the wood remembers.

She did not come back that night. The camellia was dead by morning.

Xiangyu, who had been in the garden, walked to the dead tree and stood beside it for a long time. Then she went to Huang's room and said everything.

The abbot cut the camellia down a week later. The wood was the color of dark wine. It was, the carpenter said, some of the finest camellia wood he had ever seen. It was made into a doorframe for the temple's east corridor — the corridor that ran past the white peony.

Xiangyu lived for another forty years after that. She was, Huang wrote, the most faithful wife in the history of the world — and then corrected himself, because they were never formally married. She was, he wrote, 花之君子 — "a gentleman among flowers," using the word 君子 (jūnzǐ) that Confucius used for the ideal person. It was, for a flower, the highest praise a scholar could give.

When Huang died — he was sixty-five, Pu Songling says — the white peony produced, for the first time in its long life, a shoot that was not white but red. The red was the color of camellia. The monks, who had watched the whole thing from beginning to end, said nothing. They simply tended the garden.

Afterword — A Note on What Staying Means in Pu Songling

This story is easy to read as a love story. It is not, or not only. Pu Songling is doing something more unusual.

He is writing about the person who stays. Xiangyu is the beloved. Huang is the mourner who refuses to accept the death. But Jiangxue — the camellia, the red dress, the face like frost — is the engine of the story. Without her, nothing happens. She is the one who delivers the warning. She is the one who comes to Huang when Xiangyu dies. She is the one who stays for three years while a stranger waters a patch of dirt. She asks nothing. She receives nothing. She dies and becomes a doorframe.

In Pu Songling's other stories, the friend-who-stays is almost always a servant, or a ghost, or a fox acting out of debt. Jiangxue is none of these. She is a plant who has loved another plant for a hundred years and who helps a human being resurrect her beloved because that is what love does — not because she owes anyone anything. She is, in the taxonomy of Liaozhai, unique.

There is one more thing. When the camellia dies, Pu Songling has the peony produce a red shoot. He does not explain this. He does not say whether Xiangyu chose to do it or whether it happened on its own. He simply records it, the way a botanist might note an unusual cultivar. The white flower bore red. The beloved carried, in her own root, the color of the friend who had gone.

Pu Songling, who spent his whole life writing about foxes and ghosts and the people who loved them, is telling us something here that he never says anywhere else in Liaozhai. He is saying that the most important thing about love is not the passion. It is not even the loss. It is the fact that the people who have been close to each other for a long time end up, eventually, looking like each other. The white flower remembered the red. The root carried the color. The doorframe stood beside the peony for a hundred years, and the peony, in its own time, in its own way, brought the red back.

This is what Pu Songling means by 情 (qíng) — the word usually translated "love" or "feeling" but which in his vocabulary covers something larger. Qíng is not what you feel for someone. It is what you become after you have been near them long enough. It is the red in the white flower. It is the wood that remembers.

He does not say whether this is enough. He does not say whether Jiangxue, inside the doorframe, is aware of the peony growing beside her for another century. He leaves that, too, to the reader.

The monks said nothing. They tended the garden.

Retelling by Cathay Tales. Source: 《聊斋志异》卷四·香玉 (Pu Songling, c. 1680, edited woodblock edition of 1766). Historical notes on Laoshan temple life, flower-spirit taxonomy, and Qing-dynasty scholar lodging customs drawn from standard commentaries.