Mount Penglai

Because Qin Shihuangdi lived in constant fear ot assassination, the roads connecting his many palaces were protected by high walls. So great was his dread of even a natural death that he was forever seeking through Daoist practitioners the secret of immortality. In his search for the elixir, so tradition has it, he sent a company of aristocratic boys and girls across the Eastern Sea to where the fabulous Mount Penglai rises amid the waves, ever receding as one approaches it. The children never returned, and it was later thought that they might have reached the shores of Japan.

1999, Michael Sullivan, “The Qin and Han Dynasties”, in The Arts of China, 4th, Expanded and Revised edition, Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 60, column 2