桃源洞 Not Unlike Peach Blossom Spring
但見那門兒外：但见那门儿外：
逐句解 Line by line
And this is what was to be seen outside that gate:
但見 — only see, or one saw only — is the standard cue for a descriptive set-piece, and here it introduces four balanced five-graph lines rather than a long rhapsody.
All round, the hills wind green; a single vein of air joins it to the city.
遶 is an older way of writing the graph for encircling, and the line picks up the dragon vein from the mountain set-piece earlier: the same ridge of energy that ran down to Jade-Flower Prefecture is here at the monster's door.
On sheer cliffs, green creepers climb; from high crags hang purple redbuds.
Both halves put the place first and the plant second, which keeps the two lines locked together. Redbud is a spring-flowering tree, and its presence makes this a pleasant, seasonal, entirely unthreatening cliff.
Birdsong rings round the deep trees; flower-shadows greet the cave mouth.
The cave mouth is welcoming visitors, and the verb is doing that on purpose. Four graphs earlier this place was called a tiger's mouth.
It yields nothing to the Peach Blossom Spring, and is fit for fleeing the world.
The comparison is to the most famous hidden valley in Chinese literature — the fisherman's paradise of Tao Yuanming's fable, a place outside time where refugees from war live in peace. The verse ends by calling a monster's lair the ideal hermitage, and means it.
Four lines, and every one of them is beautiful. That is the point. The novel has just spent eight lines describing a doorkeeper as a nightmare, and now describes the door itself as somewhere a poet might retire to.
The Peach Blossom Spring is the reference that seals it. Tao Yuanming's story of a fisherman stumbling into a valley of people who fled the wars centuries before is the standard Chinese image for an unspoiled refuge, and invoking it here is close to calling the Tiger-Mouth Cave a paradise.
There is a real idea underneath the joke. Monsters in this book almost always live somewhere lovely, and their caves are furnished with the vocabulary of retirement and retreat. What separates a fiend's hideout from a hermit's is not the landscape but what is being done inside it — and inside this one there is a stolen woman and a stolen rake.