Our story

Magu is not our invention. She is a figure from Chinese legend, and she is the reason this shop looks the way it does.

What the sources say

The fullest early account of Magu (麻姑) appears in the Shenxian zhuan — Biographies of Divine Transcendents — compiled by Ge Hong in the fourth century CE. She arrives at the house of Cai Jing as a young woman with long, bird-like nails, and remarks that she has three times seen the Eastern Sea turn into fields of mulberry. That line survives as a Chinese idiom for the vastness of time: 沧海桑田, blue seas to mulberry fields.

She is a Daoist immortal, associated across later centuries with longevity — the motif 麻姑献寿, Magu offers longevity, is still painted for birthdays. A mountain in Jiangxi carries her name. The first character of that name, 麻, is the ordinary Chinese word for hemp.

Accounts of her differ between sources and between centuries, and the hemp in her name is a matter of the character rather than of any story about the plant. We are not scholars, and we will not pretend the legend says more than it does.

What we take from it

What follows is ours, not history.

We borrow her garden as a picture of how we would like to work. Patiently. Without hurry, and without noise. With hemp treated as a plant that deserves to be described accurately rather than sold loudly.

That is the whole of the borrowing. Nothing on this site should be read as a claim about the legend, about Daoism, or about what our products will do for you.