At the foot of Mount Lao stood the Xiaqing Temple, and in its courtyard grew two marvels: a camellia twenty feet tall, and beside it a white peony taller than a man, which when it bloomed shone like brocade. A scholar named Huang of Jiaozhou took a room there to study, and one day, looking up from his book, he saw a woman in white among the flowers.
He thought a temple was a strange place for such a woman, and went out — but she had gone. He saw her again, and again, and one evening he hid in the bushes and watched her come walking with a companion in red, the two of them lovelier than anything he had ever imagined. He sprang out; they fled in a drift of perfume and vanished over a wall. He found no door, no footprint — only the peony and the camellia, breathing scent in the dusk.
He wrote poems to the unseen lady and left them by the flowers, and one evening she came to his room: the woman in white, who said her name was Xiangyu, Fragrant Jade. They became lovers. She came and went like a fragrance, never staying past dawn, and when he asked where she lived she only smiled toward the courtyard.
Then a visitor to the temple, taken with the great white peony, got leave to dig it up and carry it home.
Xiangyu came to Huang that night in tears. “We must part,” she said. “You will not see me again.” In the morning Huang learned about the flower, and understood at last what she was. He hurried to the visitor’s house — the peony, transplanted, was already wilting; within days it was dead. Huang wept over the bare root-stock, and carried it home, and planted it in his own courtyard where the pool reflected it, and poured libations of wine into the earth and grieved.
The red camellia, left alone in the temple, began to die too — and the woman in red, Jiangxue, came to Huang in a dream, wasting with sorrow for her sister. Huang poured his grief into the garden: he tended the root-stock every day, watered it with his own hands, spoke to it as one speaks at a sickbed. The monks laughed at the scholar mourning a dead flower.
In the spring a green shoot came up from the stock.
It grew; it budded; and on the morning it opened, Huang came out and found Xiangyu standing beside the flower, smiling at him through tears, solid in the sunlight. “I was a small cold thing in the dark,” she said, “and every day you came, and I followed your voice up into the light.” After that she lived with him, and the camellia too recovered, and for a time the little courtyard was the happiest place under heaven.
The tale does not pretend it lasted. Years later Huang fell ill and knew he was dying, and he told his friend not to grieve: he had loved a flower, he said, and a flower’s way was not to mourn but to return. When he was dead a red peony sprang up beside Xiangyu’s stock — a kind that had never grown there — and bloomed every year after, taller and brighter than any in the district. The monks kept it, and called it after him.