'Preface to the Lychee Illustration': How Long Can Colour, Fragrance and Flavour Survive Beyond the Branch?
Grandevity Studio presents Preface to the Lychee Illustration, a complete musical setting of Bai Juyi’s original Tang-dynasty prose. Luminous female vocals, pipa harmonics, guqin, celesta, Fender Rhodes, nylon guitar, Neo-Soul bass, brushed drums and chamber strings evoke the lychee at its freshest—and the gradual disappearance of its colour, fragrance and flavour after it leaves the branch.
Some forms of beauty do not fail because they are insufficiently vivid.
They vanish because their most complete state is too brief to be preserved.
Once a lychee is separated from its branch, its colour changes after one day, its fragrance after two, and its flavour after three. Beyond the fourth or fifth day, all three have disappeared.
If it leaves its original branch, its colour changes in one day, its fragrance in two days, and its flavour in three days. After four or five days, its colour, fragrance and flavour are entirely gone.
Preface to the Lychee Illustration is a Mandarin female-vocal work that sets the complete original text of Bai Juyi’s short Tang-dynasty prose piece to music.
The lyrics contain no modern expansion, rewriting, added chorus or newly composed lines. The song uses 100% of Bai Juyi’s original Chinese text, sung once and in its original order. Its duration and emotional development are created through instrumental introductions, interludes, silence, harmonic transformation and an extended outro rather than lyrical repetition.
Bai Juyi begins with an extraordinarily precise sequence of observations.
He identifies where lychees grow.
He describes the rounded tree canopy, evergreen leaves, spring flowers, cinnabar-red summer fruit, grape-like clusters, loquat-like stones, red-silk shells, purple-gauze membranes, translucent white flesh and richly sweet-tart juice.
The prose unfolds like a botanical illustration, but it also functions as a memory of early summer constructed through shape, colour, texture, fragrance and flavour.
Yet Bai Juyi does not allow the work to remain a celebration of an exotic fruit.
With the four characters meaning “if it leaves its original branch,” the entire centre of gravity changes.
The lychee becomes more than something delicious.
It becomes an image of beauty that cannot remain complete once removed from the living conditions that sustained it.
Watch the MV: 🎬 Preface to the Lychee Illustration | Official Music Video
Headphones recommended. Begin in the early-summer orchards of the Ba Gorges, where morning mist, dew-covered leaves and a young woman beneath the lychee trees introduce the fruit at its most vivid. Move through the red shell, delicate membrane, translucent flesh and rich juice; then watch the light cool as colour, fragrance and flavour recede day by day. The final movement enters Bai Juyi’s lamplit study at Nanbin, where a painting and written preface attempt to preserve what the fruit itself cannot retain.
A Preface Written for an Image—and for Those Who Could Not See the Fruit Themselves
Bai Juyi dates the text to the summer of the fifteenth year of the Yuanhe era.
At its conclusion, he writes:
In the summer of the fifteenth year of Yuanhe, Letian, governor at Nanbin, ordered artisans and clerks to make an illustration and wrote this text upon it.
“Letian” was Bai Juyi’s courtesy name.
He commissioned an image of the lychee and supplied a written preface, not simply to celebrate a southern delicacy or record a private tasting experience, but for two particular groups of readers:
It was intended for those who did not know the fruit, and for those who knew it but could not encounter it within the first, second or third day.
The first group had never seen a lychee.
The second knew what a lychee was, but could not see or taste one quickly enough after it had been removed from the branch.
The work therefore has a documentary purpose.
The illustration preserves visible form.
The prose supplements what an image cannot fully communicate: colour, texture, fragrance, flavour and the changes produced by time.
More than a millennium later, the music attempts to preserve another dimension: the rhythm, breath and emotional turn of Bai Juyi’s language.
“Lychees Grow in the Region of the Ba Gorges”: Observation Beginning with Place
The text opens with a direct geographical statement:
Lychees grow in the region of the Ba Gorges.
Bai Juyi first establishes place, then moves from the whole tree toward its smallest details.
The tree is rounded and spreading, like a canopy.
The leaves resemble cassia leaves and remain green through winter.
The flowers resemble orange blossoms and flourish in spring.
The fruit is red as cinnabar and ripens in summer.
This order is deliberate.
The prose first establishes landscape and season, then gradually narrows its field of vision from tree to leaf, flower and fruit, like a camera travelling from a wide view of the gorges toward a single branch.
The brief sequence “green in winter, flowering in spring, ripening in summer” places an entire cycle of seasonal growth inside a few compact phrases.
The lychee is therefore not an isolated object resting upon a table.
It belongs to a particular geography of mountains, moisture, sunlight and time.
While it remains upon the branch, its colour, fragrance and flavour are still connected with the living tree.
This is what gives the later phrase “leaves its original branch” such force.
Red Silk, Purple Gauze and Ice: How Language Approaches a Lychee
The best-known passage is a sequence of controlled and sensuous comparisons:
Its clusters resemble grapes; its stone resembles that of the loquat; its shell resembles red silk; its membrane resembles purple gauze; its flesh shines white like ice and snow; and its juice is sweet and tart like rich sweet wine and cream.
The fruit grows in clusters like grapes.
Its stone resembles a loquat stone.
The textured red shell is compared with red silk.
The thin membrane surrounding the flesh is as delicate as purple gauze.
Once peeled, the flesh appears luminous and white as ice or snow.
Its juice combines sweetness and acidity with a rich, almost creamy fullness.
Bai Juyi does not reduce the fruit to the general adjectives “beautiful,” “sweet” or “delicious.”
Instead, each material comparison describes a different property.
Red silk conveys colour and textile texture.
Purple gauze suggests thinness, softness and translucency.
Ice and snow suggest purity, luminosity and coolness.
Sweet wine and cream suggest richness, sweetness and a slight fermented acidity.
Language becomes an instrument of sight, touch and taste.
Yet Bai Juyi remains aware that analogy is not the thing itself.
He therefore follows the most elaborate description with a concise admission:
This roughly describes it, although the fruit in reality surpasses the description.
“In Reality It Surpasses This”: Language Admitting Its Limits
“This roughly describes it, although in reality it surpasses the description” is one of the most important pauses in the work.
Bai Juyi has already used an unusually concentrated series of comparisons to help distant readers imagine a fruit they may never have seen.
But precise description does not lead him to claim that language can replace direct experience.
He openly recognises the limit of representation.
A picture can preserve form.
Words can add colour, fragrance and flavour.
But neither can reproduce the experience of opening a newly harvested lychee, seeing light move through its flesh and tasting the sweet-tart juice at its freshest.
This admission does not weaken the prose.
It makes it more trustworthy.
Bai Juyi is writing about an experience that resists preservation, transport and distant reproduction.
The more carefully he describes it, the more clearly he understands that reality remains beyond description.
“If It Leaves Its Original Branch”: From Summer Abundance to Impermanence
The true turn of the text consists of only four Chinese characters:
If it leaves its original branch—
Before this moment, every image is abundant.
The canopy is full.
The spring flowers flourish.
The summer fruit is cinnabar red.
The flesh resembles ice and snow.
The juice recalls sweet wine and cream.
But once the fruit is removed from the branch, time begins to act with remarkable speed:
Its colour changes after one day, its fragrance after two, and its flavour after three.
On the first day, the most visible quality begins to disappear.
On the second, the fragrance changes.
On the third, the flavour itself is no longer the same.
After the fourth or fifth day:
Its colour, fragrance and flavour are entirely gone.
Bai Juyi does not merely say that the fruit spoils quickly.
He divides disappearance into stages that can be seen, smelled and tasted.
Colour, fragrance and flavour do not vanish at once.
They leave in sequence.
Time therefore becomes more than a count of days. It is a force that removes freshness layer by layer.
The passage also reaches beyond the preservation of fruit.
People become separated from places.
Memories become separated from the conditions in which they were formed.
A work becomes separated from the first voice that gave it life.
Many things do not vanish immediately. Like the lychee, they first lose brightness, then atmosphere, and finally even the flavour by which we believed we remembered them.
Chinese Chamber R&B: Allowing Colour, Fragrance and Flavour to Appear in Sound
The final production style of Preface to the Lychee Illustration is built around Premium Chinese Chamber R&B and Neo-Traditional Art-Pop, at approximately 70 BPM in a flowing 6/8 metre, using a through-composed structure.
The arrangement features:
- A clear, luminous and restrained Standard Mandarin female vocal, with precise classical-Chinese diction, no shouting and no theatrical operatic delivery.
- Pipa harmonics, guqin, celesta and water-drop ambience, opening the early-summer landscape with a crystalline, translucent sound.
- Warm Fender Rhodes, providing a contemporary Mandarin R&B harmonic foundation.
- Nylon-string guitar, adding a soft and tactile intimacy.
- Controlled Neo-Soul bass, maintaining movement without making the arrangement heavy.
- Brushed drums and delicate hand percussion, allowing the 6/8 metre to move like leaves and silk in a light wind.
- Chamber strings, gradually expanding through the images of red silk, purple gauze, ice, snow and rich juice.
- A brief harmonic opening at the line “This roughly describes it; in reality it surpasses this,” as the prose reaches the boundary of representation.
- A shift toward spacious minor harmony at “If it leaves its original branch,” where rhythm and instrumentation begin to withdraw.
- Deliberate pauses between the first, second, third, fourth and fifth days, making the passage of time audible.
- A final return to restraint in the Nanbin study, followed by a reflective pipa-and-xiao outro in which painting, writing and memory remain beneath the lamplight.
The song does not repeat a chorus to extend its duration.
Bai Juyi’s text is sung once.
Every instrumental space serves a specific state: fruit still upon the branch, fruit newly removed, and the progressive disappearance of colour, fragrance and flavour.
The MV: From the Summer Orchards of the Ba Gorges to the Lamplight of Nanbin
The MV adopts a cinematic classical-realism style and remains within the historical world of the Tang dynasty during the Yuanhe era.
Its visual narrative follows two connected lines.
The first centres upon a young woman in the lychee orchards of the Ba Gorges.
She is not a newly added character in the lyrics, nor does she alter Bai Juyi’s prose. She functions as a visual guide, bringing the viewer close to the tree canopy, leaves, blossoms, shell, membrane, flesh and juice.
The early-summer morning is built from deep green, cinnabar red, ivory, pale apricot and warm gold.
While the fruit remains upon the branch, the lychees are full, leaves carry dew, and fabric moves lightly in the wind.
When the woman finally removes a branch of fruit, the visual temperature begins to fall.
The colour changes after one day.
The fragrance changes after two.
The flavour changes after three.
Evening gradually replaces daylight. Red becomes muted. The fruit upon the wooden table and inside the bamboo basket loses its gloss. The visual world moves from summer sweetness toward a cooler contemplation of time.
The second visual line turns toward Bai Juyi during the final section.
Nanbin enters dusk.
Bai Juyi appears as a scholar-official of approximately forty-eight years of age, dressed in a blue-grey round-collared official robe and black futou.
Clerks unfold paper.
An artist studies real lychees while painting the scroll.
Fresh and faded fruit are placed side by side upon the desk.
Bai Juyi writes the preface beneath lamplight.
In the final image, the completed lychee illustration, the real fruit and Bai Juyi seated behind them occupy the frame together.
The painting preserves visible form.
The preface preserves knowledge.
The song preserves the moment in which both are seen and heard again in another age.
📜 Complete Original Text with English Translation
[Bai Juyi, “Preface to the Lychee Illustration” — Complete Original Text]
荔枝生巴峽間，
Lychees grow in the region of the Ba Gorges.
樹形團團如帷蓋，
The tree is rounded and spreading, like a canopy.
葉如桂，冬青，
Its leaves resemble cassia leaves and remain green through winter.
華如橘，春榮，
Its flowers resemble orange blossoms and flourish in spring.
實如丹，夏熟。
Its fruit is red as cinnabar and ripens in summer.
朵如蒲萄，
Its clusters resemble grapes.
核如枇杷，
Its stone resembles that of the loquat.
殼如紅繒，
Its shell resembles red silk.
膜如紫綃，
Its membrane resembles fine purple gauze.
瓤肉瑩白如冰雪，
Its flesh shines white like ice and snow.
漿液甘酸如醴酪。
Its juice is richly sweet and tart, like sweet wine and cream.
大略如彼，
This roughly describes it,
其實過之。
although the fruit in reality surpasses the description.
若離本枝，
If it leaves its original branch,
一日而色變，
its colour changes after one day,
二日而香變，
its fragrance after two days,
三日而味變，
and its flavour after three days.
四五日外，
Beyond the fourth or fifth day,
色香味盡去矣。
its colour, fragrance and flavour are entirely gone.
元和十五年夏，
In the summer of the fifteenth year of the Yuanhe era,
南賓守樂天命工吏圖而書之，
Letian, governor at Nanbin, ordered artisans and clerks to make an illustration and wrote this text upon it.
蓋為不識者，
It was intended for those who did not know the fruit,
與識而不及一二三日者云。
and for those who knew it but could not encounter it within the first, second or third day.
A Song with No Expanded Lyrics—and No Need for Them
Preface to the Lychee Illustration adds no modern chorus, newly written emotional refrain or contemporary narrator.
Bai Juyi’s original already contains a complete musical arc.
The Ba Gorges and the lychee tree establish space.
Leaves, flowers and fruit introduce colour.
Red silk, purple gauze, ice, snow and rich juice build toward a sensory peak.
“In reality it surpasses this” acknowledges the limit of language.
“If it leaves its original branch” suddenly turns the work toward time and disappearance.
The final sentence returns to the summer of Yuanhe’s fifteenth year and the study at Nanbin, explaining why the image and preface were made.
Additional lyrics could interrupt this unusually precise structure.
The production therefore allows music alone to extend the time of observation and feeling.
The words are not repeated.
Their meaning is not rewritten.
The flourishing and disappearance of colour, fragrance and flavour remain entirely Bai Juyi’s own.
💿 Credits
- Song Title: Preface to the Lychee Illustration
- Chinese Title: 荔枝圖序
- Classical Source: Bai Juyi, “Lizhi Tu Xu”
- Literary Period: Tang Dynasty
- Original Text / Lyrics: Bai Juyi
- Expanded Lyrics / Adaptation: None
- Lyrics Format: 100% of Bai Juyi’s complete original text; no rewriting, expansion or additional lyrics
- Composition / Arrangement: Suno AI / Grandevity Studio
- Vocals: Suno AI Standard Mandarin female vocal
- Music Production: Grandevity Studio
- AI-Assisted Visuals: ChatGPT Images
- Video Editing / Art Direction / Creative Production: Grandevity Studio
- Released by: Grandevity Limited
- Production Year: 2026
Final Music Style and Mood:
Premium Chinese chamber R&B and neo-traditional art-pop, 70 BPM, flowing 6/8, through-composed, clear luminous Standard Mandarin female vocal, intimate and restrained delivery, pipa harmonics, guqin, celesta, water-drop ambience, warm Fender Rhodes, nylon guitar, Neo-Soul bass, brushed drums, hand percussion and chamber strings; crystalline and summery first half, spacious minor-harmony transition at “若離本枝”, measured pauses between the passing days, reflective pipa-and-xiao outro.
⚖️ Copyright Notice
Bai Juyi’s Tang-dynasty text “Preface to the Lychee Illustration” is a public-domain classical literary work.
This song uses 100% of Bai Juyi’s original text as its lyrics. It contains no modern expansion, rewriting or additional lyrical material.
The musical composition and production, sound recording, arrangement, mixing, mastering, MV imagery, cover artwork, video editing, copywriting, subtitles, storyboard design, art direction and overall creative concept were produced or lawfully licensed by Grandevity Limited / Grandevity Studio and are protected by copyright and related rights to the extent permitted by applicable law.
Unauthorized re-uploading, redistribution, reproduction, editing, sampling, commercial use, public broadcasting, platform distribution, AI training, dataset use, remixing, or use in any other audiovisual work is strictly prohibited.
Licensing Contact:
About the Project
Preface to the Lychee Illustration is part of Grandevity Studio’s Classical Literature Reimagined in Music series.
The project seeks to bring classical Chinese prose beyond textbooks, annotation, translation and memorisation, allowing it to re-enter contemporary melody, rhythm, sound, imagery and emotional experience.
More than a millennium ago, Bai Juyi ordered an image to be made of a fruit that could not remain fresh for long.
He knew that a painting could not preserve fragrance.
Words could not preserve the actual flavour.
Even the most precise comparison could only admit:
This roughly describes it; in reality it surpasses the description.
Yet the impossibility of complete preservation is precisely why people continue to record.
An image remembers form.
A text remembers colour, fragrance and taste.
Music reopens the season and the passage of time contained within the words.
The things we treasure do not always remain.
Some memories first lose their colour.
Some people and places gradually lose the atmosphere by which we knew them.
Some once-vivid flavours eventually leave behind only a name.
May we learn to see, taste and cherish what is present before its colour, fragrance and flavour are gone.