THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The first eastern guideway arrives at Mount Tai: jade above, gold below, and the source of the Huan River, which flows east into the Jiang, its waters full of rock crystal. The mountain's beast is, to all appearances, simply a pig. It is called the tongtong, its cry sounds like its own name, and it has exactly one marvel: 'it has pearls' — pearls that grow inside its body. As the oyster gestates its pearl in a shell, the tongtong gestates its treasure in a pig's belly, coarse bristles wrapped around something lustrous.
Guo Pu's verse encomium fixed its reputation in eight characters: 'The tongtong is like a pig — clad in coarse cloth, harbouring pearls.' The phrase adapts the Laozi's image of the sage who wears rough homespun over hidden jade, and it lent the animal a lasting fable-like flavour in later illustrated editions: a beast-shaped footnote on plain exteriors and hidden worth. How the pearls form, and whether they can be harvested, the text never says. It does not even offer the usual note on edibility. The walking pearl-womb is simply entered into the record.
Commentators generally take this Mount Tai to be the actual Eastern Peak in Shandong, the Huan a mountain stream on its slopes. In the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the foremost of the Five Sacred Peaks produces, besides gold and jade, precisely one wonder: a pig with pearls inside.
