THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Classic of Regions Beyond the Seas: East describes a country where everyone wears formal robe and cap, carries a sword, eats the flesh of beasts, and keeps two striped tigers in attendance, tame as house dogs. Their defining trait comes in four characters: they love to yield and do not contend. In their land grows the xunhua plant, which flowers at dawn and dies by evening.
The Land of the Gentlemen distills an old Chinese idealization of the east. The Han dictionary Shuowen Jiezi, surveying the peoples of the four quarters, calls the customs of the eastern folk humane and speaks of a country of gentlemen where no one dies. The Qing novel Flowers in the Mirror turned the place into its most quoted satire: in the gentlemen's marketplace, buyers protest that the goods are too fine and the price too low, insisting on paying more, while sellers refuse to accept full price, and passers-by must be called in to arbitrate the deadlock of politeness. Every detail of the country runs the same demonstration: swords worn but never drawn in quarrel, tigers at heel but never loosed, strength and courtesy occupying the same body.
