THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Penglai heads the three spirit-mountains of the Bohai Sea, named alongside Fangzhang and Yingzhou. Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, in the Treatise on the Feng and Shan Sacrifices, gives the fullest account: from the fourth century BCE the kings of Qi and Yan sent men to sea in search of the mountains, where immortals kept the drug of deathlessness, every bird and beast was white, and the palaces were built of gold and silver. Seen from afar the isles hung like cloud; as ships drew near they sank beneath the water, or a wind rose and pulled the vessels away, so that no one ever landed. After unifying China, the First Emperor of Qin dispatched Xu Fu with thousands of boys and girls to find them; the fleet never returned. Emperor Wu of Han likewise made repeated progresses to the coast to gaze toward Penglai. The Liezi adds an older cosmology: five floating mountains once rode on the heads of fifteen giant sea-turtles until a giant of the Longbo kingdom fished six turtles away and two of the isles drifted off and sank, leaving three.
Penglai became the master-word for the Chinese fairyland. Daoism ranked it first among the ocean paradises; in Bai Juyi's Song of Everlasting Sorrow a magician finds the dead consort on such an isle; and the Eight Immortals set out across the sea from Penglai. In the 1060s the Penglai Pavilion was built on Danya Hill in Dengzhou, where mirages sometimes rise off the coast in late spring, long read as glimpses of the spirit-mountains, and Su Shi wrote his Mirage poem while serving there. The district of Penglai in Yantai, Shandong, still anchors the legend on the map.
