Case file · Folklore / legend
The Peach Blossom Spring
In a fable written by the poet Tao Yuanming in 421, a fisherman follows a stream through a peach grove to a cave and emerges in a hidden valley whose people have lived cut off from the world for centuries.
421 CE · 28.80, 111.48 · status: legend
The account
The villagers' ancestors had fled the wars of the Qin dynasty. When the fisherman later tried to find the cave again, he never could. The story became the Chinese image of a lost paradise, and Taoyuan county in Hunan claims to be the place.
The sceptical view
A literary fable, not a report, though it draws on the Chinese tradition of grotto-heavens where immortals live inside mountains.