quite, reach the dignity of godship. The same might be said of the "Chief of the Community of Elders"[1] who there exercises sovereignty over the spirits of all aquatic animals of the world.
Time does not permit an attempt to enumerate all the wonders of the Five Islands. Taoist writers dilate upon their gorgeous palaces, their gay-plumaged birds, and their gemmeous vegetation. Nor have we even exhausted the mine of information to be found in the Record of the Ten Islands. One island, distinct from the five, therein described as lying far off in the eastern main, must not be left unmentioned, if for no other reason than that it has been the subject; of speculation and controversy among Western scholars, some of whom have sought to prove a Chinese discovery of America many centuries before Columbus. This, the "Country of the Leaning Mulberry" (Fu-sang), is named after its forests of gigantic mulberry trees, growing in twos, with the trees of each pair inclined together. They bear their fruit but once in nine thousand years, and hsien who eat thereof become lustrous with golden glory, and endowed with the power of roaming the skies.
It should moreover be noted that the Eastern Sea is not the only site of ocean paradises inhabited by hsien, and containing agencies of immortality. Assuming the truth of the ancient fiction that China constitutes the world and is surrounded by four seas, some Taoist fabulists have allotted to the remaining points of the compass islands similar in many ways to those I have described. This extension of the overseas Otherworld may be regarded as the literary fantasy of a few imaginative enthusiasts, and not as representing the popular conception that has been current in China for more than twenty centuries. In general literature and in common parlance, the Isles of the Blest are a group lying somewhere to the east, and
- ↑ Chang jên kung chu.
