Peach-Blossom Luck, and the Demon-Quelling Wood

The peach blossom is also the flower of romance and marriage in Chinese usage: peach-blossom luck is the term for fortune in love, and a face like peach blossom is a classic image of youthful beauty. The famous Peach Blossom Spring of the poet Tao Yuanming, a hidden valley of blossoming peach trees sheltering a lost utopia, made the flower a sign of an ideal, unreachable paradise. Peach wood, meanwhile, had a protective and demon-quelling power: charms and door-guardian figures were cut from it to drive off evil spirits at the New Year. Immortality, love, paradise and protection against demons all attach to the one pink spring blossom.

In Chinese astrology, specifically the Zi Wei Dou Shu or Purple Star system still consulted by practitioners today, a specific placement called the Peach Blossom Star, Tao Hua, is read in a person's chart as governing charm, romantic attraction and sometimes scandal, a technical astrological term borrowed directly from the flower's old reputation for beauty and love rather than a later coinage, showing the blossom's symbolism was formalised into a living divinatory system rather than remaining loose folklore. This same term is still used casually in modern Chinese to describe someone having good luck in romance, a piece of technical astrology that has passed into everyday speech.