entering into communication with hsien, and so learning their secret, he erected elaborate buildings for their reception if ever they could be persuaded to appear, and in one of these palaces he had models made of the Isles of the Blest.[1]
Enough has been said to trace the historical beginning and early development of the belief. It seems highly probable, almost certain in fact, that a vague knowledge of Japan contributed to its inception. This theory has been elaborated with great thoroughness by Schlegel, who finds a circumstantial origin for many of the wonders attributed to the Enchanted Islands.[2] Their palaces were in fact the shrines and hermitages environed then as now with Nature's most entrancing scenes, and hsien were the priestly inhabitants. The Japanese have always been noted for longevity. The founts of magic elixir were the thermal springs, of which the curative properties were already recognised in that far-off age, and the abundant gems and fairy groves were but fanciful versions of actual pearl fisheries and submarine coral forests. There is, too, a passage in the Record of the Ten Islands which I have not yet quoted, and it seems strongly to support the theory. In describing Ying Chou it says:—
"There are many communities of hsien on the island, whose customs resemble those of the men of Wu. The mountains and rivers are like those of the Middle Kingdom."
Wu was a feudal state occupying a costal region of China corresponding to parts of Kiangsu and Chehkiang.
I have already drawn a geographical analogy between the Chinese Isles of the Blest and the Insulae Fortunatae. Both groups lay somewhere across the ocean, beyond the limits of the known world. The currency of both in folk-lore may be largely attributed to sailors' yarns about actual islands they had visited—tales which, like most
