The Peach Blossom Spring Cave-Heaven

Poet Táo Yuānmíng 陶淵明 (365–427 CE) lived during the Period of Division (220–581 CE), a violent and turbulent era of Chinese history. His poetic essay Record of the Peach Blossom Spring reflected a common desire of the time: to escape the chaos. In the story, a fisherman finds a cave and passes through it to discover a hidden utopia in which people live a simple, carefree life. He leaves to collect his family and return but is never able to find the cave again. This tale of a paradise lost remains a perpetual theme in various Chinese art forms.

In the painting, we can see the fisherman’s boat moored near the cave in the lower left, and the fisherman himself is the figure being greeted by a group at the bottom of the painting. In this version, however, the secret land is not the rustic village described in the text. With its blue-green mountains and extravagant towers and pavilions, it is more akin to images of the hidden realms of the immortals, a class of deities in the Daoist religious tradition. The title at the upper right notes that this is a cave-heaven, or dòngtiān 洞天. In Daoism, these were sacred sites accessible through caves or mountain recesses, but which could be found only by the worthy.