Taiwan has long been known as a paradise of fruit, an appellation even truer today as scientific cross-breeding leads to ever greater improvements. But besides its place on the table, fruit holds a prominent place in the world of Chinese art and the Chinese imagination as well.
While fruit and floral images have been used symbolically in the arts of both East and West for a long time, animal images predominated in the art of pre-Han China (before 206 B.C.) to be fully replaced by floral motifs, many of them Western in origin, only with the introduction of Buddhism in the third and fourth centuries. Later, pictures of fruits and flowers became an established genre in Chinese painting, surpassing in importance their place in the West.
Fruits commonly pictured in Chinese art include grapes, pomegranates, plums, tangerines, lotus roots, watermelons, persimmons, loquats, and longans, or dragon's eyes, among others. Grapes and pomegranates originated in the deserts of the Middle East, where they were often depicted in art, their thirst-quenching juices being regarded as the water of life and the red and shiny pomegranate as a symbol of the sun.
Chinese adopted the figures of the clustering grape and the pomegranate, bursting with seeds, as tokens of abundance and fertility. As such, they were often used to decorate folk implements, clothing, and buildings. The pomegranate, in fact, together with the peach and the bergamot, was the third of the "three fruits of plenty," representing an abundance of good fortune, longevity, and descendants.
Rarely pictured outside China, the bergamot, or "Buddha's hand," was named for its peculiar shape. By a play on the Chinese words for Buddha, fo, and fortune, fu, it came to symbolize good luck.
Just as the apple frequently appears in European myth and folklore, so the peach long ago acquired symbolic resonances for the Chinese. In the ancient Book of Songs, ripening peaches were compared to a young girl coming of age:
The peach tree's young and tender;
Bright, bright are its blossoms.
The girl's getting married
To a suitable family.
With their soft, fresh hue, peaches have long been used as a metaphor for feminine beauty. They have also been granted magical properties. The coiling peaches of the Queen Mother of the West grant immortality, while the land beyond the Peach Blossom Spring, described in T'ao Ch'ien's early fourth century tale, is the Chinese equivalent of Shangri-la.
For the Chinese, beautiful fresh fruit is more than a delight to the palate. As a powerful symbol in art and legend, it is also a pleasure for the eye and rewarding food for thought.
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