The Magic Peach

Far out on the ocean, so far that no ship has ever sailed there, lies an island where the royal lady Su Wang Moo, the Western Queen Mother, had her palace seven stories high. She is always ready to help good people on earth with her gifts and favors. Thousands of spirits wait on the island to carry out her commands, and she has chariots of silver and gold drawn by dragons to take her messages everywhere. She also keeps hundreds of sky-blue pigeons, which she sends to faraway places carrying some gift or promise in their beaks or under their wings to make people happy.

Griffis imagines a girl dreaming that one day the Western Queen Mother will send her silk clothes and jeweled necklaces, a handsome young man to marry and a silver ring for the wedding. She pictures how fine she will look as a bride, her long black hair piled high and crowned with flowers and rosettes, with fur-trimmed slippers on her feet. She imagines drinking the cups of wedding wine that make her a wife and then going with her husband to bow before the memorial tablets of his ancestors. Most of all she hopes for a kind mother-in-law, for then she will be queen of her own little kingdom, with plenty of rice and kimchi and cakes. In this picture, girls dress in their best and watch the moonlit sky for the blue pigeons.

The narrator imagines boys dreaming too, of riding on a dragon’s back over mountains and oceans to strange, distant lands. A boy dreams of the pink coat that shows he is engaged, in the marriage arrangements imagined in this opening. He dreams of the day when the long braid down his back will be tucked up into a man’s topknot, which the narrator presents as a sign of adult status. He imagines going up to the city with the other young men of his village to sit the great examinations, marching under a banner tufted with pheasant feathers, and coming home in triumph to music. One day he might become a magistrate with amber beads over his ear and a gold-embroidered square on his chest, carried about in a sedan chair. No wonder the boys watch for the blue pigeon too!

Now, in the gardens of the Queen’s palace on the Island of Gems grow wonderful fruits of rich, glowing color. When they are served at her banquets, they make the guests live very long, even thousands of years. The most powerful of all is the heavenly peach of long life, served on little golden tables. Its juice makes an old body new, so that whoever eats it will live for hundreds of years. Sometimes the Queen sends one of these peaches to her favorites on earth, but no one can ever have one unless she gives it herself, for the peach trees are always closely guarded by spirits and dragons. Not even her servants, her maids, her spirits or her dragons may give the peach of long life to a mortal.

It happened that the Queen heard of the good qualities of a certain king’s son, and she sent one of her lovely maidens in a dragon chariot to invite him to visit her on the Island of Gems. She sent word to his parents too, promising that their son would come back before the end of the month, for the moon was then only in its first quarter.

His anxious mother, who had already chosen a bride for him, warned him not to look too long at the lovely princesses and maids in the Queen’s palace. In truth she had her suspicions. Under their rosy faces and moonlike eyes, she feared, they might really be sea monsters in disguise who could gobble him up. She also told him to be very careful about his manners, since the rules of good behavior there might not be the same as among polite people on earth. And he must notice everything and come home and tell her all about it.

Meanwhile the Queen warned the lovely maiden she was sending, who was a princess herself, to take care that the prince did not fall in love with her, either on the way or on the island. If he talked her into marrying him and staying on earth instead of returning to her duties, she would be disgraced and die young. The Queen laughed as she said it and quoted the proverb, “Don’t trust a pigeon to carry grain,” but she was quite serious, and the maiden knew better than to cross her.

So the sensible princess made up her mind to be very careful. When she met the prince, she would be cool and formal and deliver the Queen’s invitation as if it were just important business, and she would not stay more than an hour in his house. On the way back she would say nothing at all and not let him sit beside her. She would keep to the front seat nearest the dragon, and he could ride on the great creature’s back.

So the prince had a very quiet journey as the chariot raced over the clouds, with the land and seas spread out far below. For part of the way he sat on the dragon’s back as if in a saddle, and then he climbed back into the chariot. He was so thrilled by the speed and the grandeur of it all that, to tell the truth, he forgot all about the lovely princess who had brought the message, until he found himself at the Queen’s Palace of Gems and was invited to step down.

Soon he was seated with other honored guests at a table crowded with gold and silver dishes heaped with the finest food. The guests, all splendidly dressed like the prince, were waited on by shining maidens of wonderful beauty, robed in gold and glittering with precious jewels. The prince’s eyes fell on one of them, a girl of about sixteen, kneeling on the floor nearby, ready to serve him. He was so struck by her beauty that he could hardly follow the talk at the table, and in spite of his mother’s warning, he made several slips in manners.

Still, after his long journey he was very hungry, and he ate heartily. Toward the end of the feast, feeling merry, he picked up one of the peaches, peeled it and sliced it and enjoyed every juicy bite. With every mouthful he felt as if he were gaining a hundred years of strength. He knew he was lengthening his life and his power to enjoy the pleasures he had always loved.

In fact, the prince was far less of a scholar than he should have been. At home his teachers were often all ready to begin the day’s lessons while he was still out playing. His older sister used to joke that he never let his studies get in the way of his education.

And every moment, the maiden kneeling near him seemed to grow more charming, in face and figure, in dress and in the grace of her movements, until she seemed the very picture of loveliness and the prince could not take his eyes off her. He did not know that this was the work of the peach of long life, for she was really no prettier at the end of the banquet than at the beginning. The change was in him, not in her.

The prince was so carried away that he quite forgot himself and his mother’s advice. He chose one of the finest peaches from its golden basket and tossed it to the pretty maiden. And she had been so taken with the handsome young guest that when he signaled he was about to throw her a peach, she broke the rule of the Palace of Gems. She threw out her hands and caught the peach neatly, as if she were playing ball.

The palace ladies were horrified. They had been taught to pay no attention to anything the guests said or did beyond their duty of serving, for guests flushed with wine might only be teasing them, and they were to refuse any special attention and go on serving. But instead of looking away or bowing low with her eyes on the ground, the maid had caught the peach, and to the horror of everyone watching, she bit into it and swallowed.

What happened the very next moment, not even the fairies could say or remember, for a golden mist seemed to fall over the banquet hall and wrap everything in it.

Just here there is a great gap in the story. At such a point, the Korean storyteller sitting in his booth in a back street of Seoul would stop and send his boy around with a gourd to collect coins from the crowd, and he would not go on until everyone had been asked to give and the coins were rattling in the gourd. When he began again, some said it was the same story, and others were sure it was a new one, though with the same palace maid and the same prince and the same peach, whose magic could never be lost because the Queen had given it. But however that may be, this is how the story went on.

More than a thousand years later, it was known that a holy hermit lived high in the Ever White Mountains, honored and almost worshiped by the people of that region. Every summer hundreds of pilgrims climbed to his hut to hear his wise words about how to live and do good and to receive his blessing. Even the wild beasts seemed tame around him. The tigers, leopards and bears never tried to hurt one another or the old man or his humble shelter. They seemed to forget they had claws and teeth, and their cubs played peacefully together. The hermit dressed in an old-fashioned style from a thousand years before, the time of the ancient kingdom of Ko.

One day, out on one of his walks, the white-bearded hermit met a woman with a lovely face who seemed quite young, for her face was smooth and rosy. She looked as if she had traveled far, yet she walked with the springy step of a teenage girl. Her clothes were of a fashion from long-gone ages, like the clothes in the paintings on the walls of the great stone tombs where kings and mighty men had been buried ten or fifteen centuries before.

The hermit and the woman met on the path under a tall pine and exchanged greetings, and she bowed very low. Then, as she looked up into his eyes, her face lit up with joy as if she had found a dear friend. The wise man asked who she was, and whether she was the wandering lady of whom people told, who had been seen for centuries all over the nine provinces of Korea, by great-grandfathers long ago and by the children of that day alike. Then she told him her story.

She was the very palace maid who had waited on him at the Western Queen Mother’s palace on the Island of Gems, when he was a merry young prince, and he was now the holy hermit. Again she bowed low. For catching and eating the peach he had tossed her and breaking the palace rules, the Queen had banished her for a thousand years. All that time she had been searching for the prince who threw her the peach of long life, for she knew that neither of them could die until the thousand years were over. But of all the men she met, however handsome or learned or wealthy, none matched the young man she had seen so long ago.

When she could not find him, she went back to the Island of Gems on a dragon’s back and humbly begged the Queen to lengthen her life until she found the one she loved so dearly, even if it took hundreds more years of wandering and waiting. The Queen heard her request kindly and granted it, and so she went on wandering the earth. Now that she had met the holy hermit, she was happy, for she was sure he was the same prince, however old he looked, because she could see his soul.

The hermit listened with delight to her tale of the palace and of her thousand years of searching for the one she loved, and especially to hear that she had been willing to let the Queen decide her future. Then his long white beard, which reached to his chest, fell away, his bald head was suddenly covered with thick black hair, and in her presence he became young again, with a spring in his step and bright eyes. His cheeks could not have been rosier, for his pure life had kept them pink. They spent many hours talking happily about their days on the Island of Gems, and they agreed that now they had found each other, they would gladly accept whatever the Queen decided for them both.

But the Queen had already heard the news from a flying dragon famous for gathering news from every corner of the universe. It had told her of the lovers’ meeting on the mountain path and of their wish to leave their future in her hands.

Suddenly the pair heard sweet music near the mountaintop, like a fairy playing a lute, and with every moment it came lower and closer. Soon a great white cloud of sweet scent, like incense, wrapped around them, and to their surprise, a golden chariot drawn by two dragons with eyes like emeralds pulled up right beside them. The prince-hermit and the maiden were lifted into the chariot and carried swiftly over clouds, mountains and sea to the Island of Gems. There the Queen ordered them to be married, and after a splendid wedding, they lived happily ever after.

About this story

“The Magic Peach” is retold from William Elliot Griffis’s Korean Fairy Tales (1922). Here the Western Queen Mother controls the peaches that extend life and determines who may receive them. The story calls her Su Wang Moo; its magical geography and lifespan belong to the tale.

Griffis begins with his imagined daydreams for girls and boys, of weddings, topknots and the great state examinations, before turning to the tale itself. Notice how he includes the old storyteller pausing to pass the hat, right in the middle of the story.

Read the original: Korean Fairy Tales (Project Gutenberg)

Suggested for ages 9–12: includes threatened disgrace and death, exile, and an unequal punishment imposed on a young palace maid.

The peach does not treat everyone equally

The prince throws the peach, but the maid receives the explicit punishment of banishment. The narrative then jumps over a thousand years: we hear about her searching and his life as a hermit, but not how every change occurred. The interruption makes that missing history visible instead of supplying a complete explanation.

At the reunion she recognises him beneath his age, reversing the banquet’s emphasis on how beautiful she looks to him. Their eventual happiness depends on the Queen’s permission as well as their feelings. That is a particular fairy-tale outcome, not a promise that waiting faithfully always brings a reward.

Label what is told and what is missing

Draw a timeline from the banquet to the mountain meeting. Put stated events above the line and unanswered questions below it. Choose one question about the prince and one about the maid. How does the storyteller’s pause affect your expectations?

Talk about it

• Why did the maid seem to grow lovelier and lovelier as the prince ate the peach?
• What rule did the maid break, and what happened to her?
• Why do you think the storyteller stopped in the middle of the story?

Related stories

• The Sky Bridge of Birds — another pair of heavenly lovers who are parted
• The Woodman and the Mountain Fairies — another tale in which an encounter with mountain spirits changes the experience of time
• The King of the Sparrows — another magical gift in a tale from Griffis