Earlier this week, and after maybe 4 years frequenting Discogs, I dropped my first ever mix on YouTube. My theory was that Mandarin-language music is often way more interesting than people think it is, and that more would listen if they could actually read the song titles. It turns out I was right - my video is approaching 30k views and has quite amazingly retained a 100:0 ratio of likes to dislikes. To keep up the encouraging interest in turn-of-the-century Mandopop, I am posting it here with extra liner notes. 欢迎收听！彼岸花 The Flower On the Opposite Bank by 王菲 Faye Wong (2000)If you are online and not from a Chinese-speaking country then you may know Faye Wong from her role in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, or possibly her collaborations with the Cocteau Twins. If you are from a Chinese-speaking country then you definitely know her, but probably for her adult contemporary ballads over the run of really good alt-leaning albums she put out at the turn of century.This song is the final piece of the 20-minute-long self-composed song cycle that opens her 2000 Fable album. You can listen to the full thing here. I put this track at the start because it transitions perfectly from orchestral strings into trip-hop and also because it’s one of my favourite songs ever.Wong is a Buddhist, and there are references to Buddhist scripture everywhere in the song cycle. The titular flower in this song is the spider lily or manjushake, which is said to lead the dead into reincarnation - ie. to the other side of a river separating one world from the next. (The flower’s name, 彼岸花 bi3 an4 hua1, literally means “flower on the opposite bank” and appears to have been borrowed into Chinese from Japanese higanbana - but say it quickly in Mandarin and you’d get a homophone for 变化 bian4hua, “to change, transform.” Is this a coincidence? Maybe.) A second plant in the song is the 昙花 tan1hua1 or udumbara, a tree of significance to the Buddhist tradition; it’s said to flower once every 3,000 years,