Pantao- Chinese ArtifactArtifact"Fruits of Eternal Life"

The Garden on Kunlun

The Peaches of Immortality grow in the garden of Xiwangmu, Queen Mother of the West, on Mount Kunlun where heaven meets earth. The orchard contains trees on three different cycles: some ripen every three thousand years, granting transcendence beyond mortal life; some every six thousand years, granting true immortality and the power of flight; and the rarest ripen only once in nine thousand years, granting existence as eternal as heaven and earth itself. Jade maidens tend the trees and celestial warriors guard the grounds. When the peaches are ready, Xiwangmu hosts the Pantao Hui, the Peach Banquet, inviting every god and immortal in heaven to feast.

The Monkey in the Garden

The peach garden's most famous episode comes in the Xiyou Ji, when the Jade Emperor assigned Sun Wukong to guard the orchard, a minor post intended to keep the troublesome Monkey King occupied with something harmless. It did not work as planned. Left alone among trees laden with fruit that granted immortality, Sun Wukong ate his fill of the rarest peaches, the nine-thousand-year ones that the gods themselves rarely tasted.

When he learned that the Pantao Hui was being held and he had not been invited, the insult compounded the temptation. Sun Wukong crashed the banquet, drank the wine of immortality, and then, for good measure, broke into the laboratory of the sage Laozi and swallowed his pills of longevity. Triple immortality, layered one on top of another, making the Monkey King so indestructible that even the gods' furnace could not burn him. The havoc he wreaked in heaven that day would take the Buddha himself to end.