千果千花 A Thousand Fruits, A Thousand Flowers
逐句解 Line by line
Rare flowers of the eight seasons; immortal fruit of the four seasons.
八節 — the eight nodes of the Chinese year: the two solstices, the two equinoxes, and the four days that begin the seasons. So flowers at every turning-point of the calendar and fruit all year round. Time has stopped being a sequence here and become an inventory.
Tall pines and ancient junipers; kingfisher-green cypress and slender bamboo.
Pine, juniper, cypress and bamboo — the four plants Chinese painting uses for endurance, because none of them dies back in winter. Last chapter's temple in the Chen village had cypress saplings still being watered and pines not yet grown into a grove. Here they are old.
Five-coloured plum now in flower, now in fruit; the ten-thousand-year peach now ripening, now fresh again.
時開時結 — now opening, now setting fruit. The plum is flowering and fruiting at the same time, which no plum does. 萬年桃 — the ten-thousand-year peach. Those are the peaches of immortality from the Queen Mother's garden, and the last time this novel mentioned them at length was chapter five, when a monkey ate the lot and started the whole story. Here they simply ripen, over and over, and nobody touches them.
A thousand fruits and a thousand flowers vying in beauty; a whole sky of auspicious haze in swirling profusion.
一天瑞靄 — a whole sky of auspicious haze. It is the same sign Taizong saw from his tower when he looked west and knew they were coming. The chapter opened on that haze over Chang'an and closes its last landscape with it over the Spirit Mountain. Same weather, both ends of the road.
The last landscape finishes on a garden where time has stopped being a sequence. Flowers at all eight turning-points of the year, fruit in all four seasons, a plum in flower and in fruit at once, and a peach that ripens and is fresh again.
Those peaches are not decorative. They are the peaches of immortality from the Queen Mother's garden, and the last time the novel dwelt on them was chapter five, when a monkey ate the lot and set the whole book in motion. Here they simply ripen, over and over, and nobody goes near them.
And the final image is a sky of auspicious haze — which is exactly what Taizong saw from his tower when he looked west and knew the pilgrims were coming. The chapter opened on that weather over Chang'an and closes its last landscape with the same weather over the Spirit Mountain.