A Paean to Immortality

The People's Republic of China does not have a national flower – but if it did, that flower would no doubt be the peony.
 
Indeed, the peony – which was briefly the official flower of the Qing Dynasty  – was chosen as national flower in a nationwide survey in 1994, although never officially ratified as such. A much-loved subject for poets and painters, the peony is a symbol of prosperity, pride, and honor. This dates back, as the story is told, to a cold, snowy night in the Tang Dynasty when the formidable Empress Wu Zetian was drinking hot rice wine with a friend. All of a sudden, she got it in her head that she wanted to see every flower in her garden blossom – in the dead of winter.
 
"Tomorrow I shall walk about my park," she says in the presumably apocryphal tale. "Send word at once to let the Spring God know, bid all the flowers blossom in the night, before the morning wind has time to blow."
 
Word was sent and all the flowers bloomed as commanded – except the proud peony. Unwilling to follow such despotic orders, the peonies collectively uprooted themselves and moved from the imperial capital of Chang'an (now Xi'an) to distant Luoyang, where they have thrived ever since. 
 
Tang Xianzu (1550-1616), the author of "The Peony Pavilion" – one of China's most famous peony-themed works – certainly embodied many of the flower's best qualities. He was brave and defiant and iconoclastic. He admired a radical school of Neo-Confucianism remembered by the slogan "The streets are full of sages!" meaning that we all possess within ourselves the power to become a sage. He passed the first level of the civil service examination at 13 and the second level at 20.  It took him some time to pass the third and final level – in part, it seems, because he refused to tutor the sons of Emperor Wan Li's Grand Secretary, a man he did not respect. This delay earned him a reputation for integrity, which was further burnished when he dared send Wan Li a "Memorial on Ministers and Advisers" that criticized a subsequent Grand Secretary for abuse of power. Wan Li was not happy, and Tang was demoted to the job of prison warden and exiled to Guangdong, then known as "the pestilent south."  Eventually he gave up on public service and devoted himself to writing drama, poems and essays (many of them political).