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Plate 1 A peach drawn point upward, a crease down one side, two leaves at its foot

Peach of immortality

The peach that gives long life or immortality in Chinese legend. It grows in the orchard of the Queen Mother of the West and ripens once in thousands of years, and the god of longevity and several of the Eight Immortals are shown holding one.

Taoist symbols. Also called immortal peach, peaches of immortality, peach symbol china, shou tao.

Meaning

In the Daoist pantheon, the Queen Mother of the West, Xiwang Mu, is in Fabrizio Pregadio’s words “an ancient goddess of the immortals”. E. T. C. Werner, in Myths and Legends of China (1922), tells of her palace in the snowy Kunlun mountains, where the immortals gather for the P’an-t’ao Hui, “the Feast of Peaches”, and are served peaches from her orchard, “endowed with the mystic virtue of conferring longevity on all who have the good luck to taste them”. The tree put out leaves once every three thousand years, and the fruit took three thousand more to ripen; the ripening fixed the date of the feast. The god of longevity, Shou Xing, holds one. Werner, who writes that he was first a star god and later shown in human form, describes him riding a stag, a bat above his head, with “a large peach” in his hand and a gourd and a scroll on his staff, and calls the peach, gourd and scroll symbols of longevity. On a nineteenth-century Daoist priest’s robe in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the crane is shown with double peaches, which the museum reads as long life and good fortune.

Origin and history

The peach passes through the stories of the immortals. Werner’s Zhongli Quan sometimes holds the peach of immortality instead of his fan; Zhang Guo carries a phoenix feather or a peach; He Xiangu holds a lotus or the peach Lü Dongbin gave her; Han Xiangzi carries flowers or a basket of peaches. All four are among the Eight Immortals.

The best-known theft of the peaches is the monkey’s. In the Hsi yu chi, as Werner retells it, Sun Hou-tzu, the Monkey Fairy, is made Grand Superintendent of the Heavenly Peach-garden, “the fruit of which conferred immortality”. He studies the peaches, eats them and is “assured against death”, and when he is left out of the Peach Festival given by the Goddess of the Immortals, he takes his revenge.

Peach wood against demons

The tree had a second power. Werner records the legend of a peach tree of fabulous size on Mount Tu Shuo in the Eastern Sea, whose lowest branches, leaning to the north-east, formed the Door of the Devils. Two spirits guarded it. When the Yellow Emperor heard of them, he had their portraits painted on peach-wood tablets and hung above doors to keep evil spirits away, the start, Werner writes, of the door gods later pasted up on paper.

With the crane

On robes and screens the peach is paired with the crane. A seventeenth-century soapstone plaque in the Victoria and Albert Museum shows the god of longevity with a crane carrying a peach branch.

See also

Crane, Eight Immortals, Yin yang (taijitu), Bagua (the eight trigrams), Fu talisman (符).

Sources

  1. Myths and Legends of China, E. T. C. Werner (London: George G. Harrap, 1922), Project Gutenberg, ch. V, The Feast of Peaches; ch. IV, The God of Longevity, The Door-gods; ch. XI; ch. XIV
  2. Religious Daoism, Fabrizio Pregadio, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Pantheon
  3. Wearing the Cosmos: The Symbolic Significance of Daoist Priest Robes, Laura Silver, 1 December 2025, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Human Realm: Auspicious Emblems
  4. Soapstone table-screen plaque, 1650–1700, Victoria and Albert Museum, Explore the Collections, object O116720, Victoria and Albert Museum, Physical description

The same shape elsewhere

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research

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