The origin of Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, has given rise to some fascinating speculations, and there are many tales about her. In the Shanhaijing (Book of Mountains and Seas) she is depicted as a fearsome creature with a leopard's tail and tiger's fangs, ruling over plague. But in other legends, she is an elegant and charming person, fond of singing.

Modern scholars generaly hold to the belief that Xiwangmu may well have been the chieftain of a western tribe - possibly a woman, but more likely a man - whose name, phonetically translated into Chinese, suggested a queen mother.

In Tales of Xiwangmu written during the Han dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD ) she is pictured as a beautiful woman of 30 who visited the Western Han dynasty emperor Wu Di (reigned 156-87 BC) and on his birthday presented him with peaches of immortality.

Whatever her origin, she is credited with being bearer of peaches which gives immortality to whoever eats them.

One of the most popular tales about Xiwangmu concerns a visit to her by King Mu, fifth ruler of the Western Zhou dynasty (11th century - 711 BC). He is famous for a great journey westward beyond the bounds of his realm. Staritng from near Luoyang, he is said to have travelled northward to Shanxi and the Huanghe River valley district and then westward across Qinghai to today¡¯s Xinjiang. Many modern historians doubt that he really travelled that far, an enormous distance for those days. The western regions were almost unknown to the people of central China, and fanciful tales about the people and places to be found there were common.

Tales of King Mu, written during the Warring States period (475-221 BC) say that far to the west he encountered a large lake, called Pearl Lake by the natives, where pearls and jade could be found. The water was clear and full of fish, and Mu had a fine time fishing and enjoying the scenery. When they reached a place named Chunshabn (near today¡¯s Congling Mountains), they found the slopes blanketed with flowers and numerous rare birds and animals.

They went on to the Kunlun Mountains where they visited Xiwangmu in her palace beside a lake named Yaochi (meaning jasper, an attractive coloured stone). He presented her with jade of exquisitely fine quality and three hundred bolts of brocade. She entertained him at a banquet beside the lake, feasting him with fabulous fruits and delicacies. Among them were a lotus that bloomed in winter with pods containing a hundred seeds, black dates two feet long from trees that bore every hundred years, and crisp, cool peaches that ripened only every ten thousand years, and conferred immortality on those who tasted them.

At the banquet, hostess and guest improvised poems for the occasion. The queen's ran :

King Mu lived for over a hundred years, but there is no record of a second journey to see the queen. On his return to the Zhou capital, his ministers complained that the trip had been too long and too extravagant. The state treasury was almost bare. Faced with the poverty of his people, Mu, who is known as a relatively conscientious ruler, gave up the idea of further travels. The incident was immortalised in a poem written some 1,800 years later by the Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin (813-858).

Other myths created a lover for her named Dongwanggong (King Father of the Eastern Paradise) who she met once a year. In stories and operas produced in later years she was known as the Golden Mother of Yao Chi, who banqueted the immortals on the peaches on her birthday, which occurred when the peaches were ripe. It is from one of these banquets that Monkey King Sun Wukong stole the peaches and got into a lot of trouble.

Legend reproduced courtesy of Shanghai on Internet