On Mount Zhiheng a white crane has spent centuries learning the secrets of immortality, and on the banks of the Xiang it keeps company with a musk deer that has become a boastful spirit. The immortals Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin come for the crane. They pin the deer at the bottom of a deep pool in the river, where it must wait until its friend comes back an immortal. The crane is sent down to be born as the son of Han Hui, elder brother of the scholar Han Yu, who is himself a heavenly general banished to earth.
The boy cries day and night until a Daoist with a fish drum comes to the door and names him Han Xiang, and after that he does not say a word for years. Orphaned young, he is raised by Han Yu and his wife, Lady Dou, who want him to study for office and marry him to Lin Luying, an academician’s daughter. Xiangzi never touches his bride. One night he climbs over the wall and goes to Mount Zhongnan to find his masters, and after trials of desire, fear and patience his name is entered among the immortals.
The harder task is bringing his uncle to the Way. Xiangzi comes back again and again as a young Daoist singing to a fish drum. When Han Yu stakes his life on praying for snow for the emperor, Xiangzi brings the snow; at Han Yu’s birthday feasts he pours wine from an empty pot and makes flowers bloom in an instant, with two lines of verse on the petals that foretell Han Yu’s fate. Han Yu, a Confucian to the bone, will not listen, so Xiangzi has a hand in the most famous episode of his life, the memorial against the Buddha’s bone, and waits for him on the snowbound road into exile. It takes twelve tries. Lady Dou and Luying go through trials of their own before the whole family is saved, and at the very end the musk deer comes up out of its pool.
