Daji tries to ensnare Mulan with honey and the peach

Daji tries to ensnare Mulan with honey and the peach by presenting herself as a helpful guide while steering Mulan away from the Jade Rabbit’s remedies. Her offers exploit Mulan’s urgent wish to save Xiu and her doubts about her own worth. The honey is poison that can silence and control its holder, while the peach is the Queen Mother of the West’s real Fruit of Longevity—but the Jade Rabbit warns that using it to keep Xiu alive would carry a grave cost.

The First Offer: Help and Honey

Daji first approaches Mulan while she is gathering wood. She claims to understand mortals better than the Jade Rabbit does and suggests that he has sent Mulan into the forest without concern for her safety. Mulan objects that the Jade Rabbit sent her to collect wood so they could make a fire, but Daji recasts the errand as evidence that he does not care for her. She offers to take care of Mulan instead, making distrust of the Jade Rabbit part of her invitation.

Daji gives Mulan wood and then produces a small, glossy ivory flask. Calling its contents honey, she suggests the Jade Rabbit might use it as medicine but urges Mulan to savor its sweetness. Mulan is drawn into the offer and waits for Daji to place the honey on her lips. A stick falls from Mulan’s bundle and strikes her foot, startling her and scattering the wood; the interruption breaks the spellbound moment. Daji’s expression briefly shows annoyance, but she resumes her smile and tells Mulan to call for her if she needs help. When Mulan asks what to call her, the woman gives the name Daji.

The exchange leaves Mulan unsettled in a way she cannot initially explain. Her usual ease with words has failed her around Daji, and she feels unusually shy and timid. In retrospect, the honey is the crucial link between Daji’s beautiful offer and the difficulty Mulan experiences in speaking freely. The apparent gift does not simply tempt her with sweetness: it creates an opening for Daji to influence what she can say and do.

A Rival Remedy

Daji meets Mulan again when she has found food. Mulan asks whether Daji brought it there so that she could find it. She also raises the Jade Rabbit’s suspicion that another Immortal is helping them, and asks whether Daji is that helper. Daji confirms her helpful appearance but sharply separates her supposed concern for Mulan from the Jade Rabbit’s needs: she says that she is there to help Mulan, not him. When Mulan tries to defend the Jade Rabbit and his effort to find medicine, Daji dismisses his herbs as ineffective.

Daji’s argument turns the rescue of Xiu into a comparison between the sisters. She acknowledges that Mulan, the Jade Rabbit, and Mulan’s parents all want Xiu to survive, then describes Xiu as graceful, accomplished, and poised—qualities she says Mulan lacks. Against that contrast, Daji offers Mulan the prospect of becoming whatever she wishes and saving her sister by doing as Daji says. She presents the promise as both a remedy for Xiu and a transformation in Mulan’s own prospects, using Mulan’s family crisis to make the offer personally compelling.

The proposed alternative is the Queen Mother of the West’s peach. Daji tells Mulan not to waste time on the Jade Rabbit’s herbs when she reaches the Queen Mother of the West’s garden. She insists that a bite of the peach will save Xiu and give Mulan everything she has wished for, then makes the instruction explicit: Mulan must pick it. Mulan repeats the word peach, and Daji reinforces the direction, leaving it as the object Mulan is meant to pursue. The temptation therefore works on two levels: it promises a way to save Xiu, and it invites Mulan to imagine becoming more charming and lovely.

The Scheme Behind the Offer

Daji’s confidence in the peach is evident when she discusses the encounter with Xianniang. Daji says Mulan now knows about the peach and will not be able to resist it. Xianniang’s thoughts connect the plan to her own past: she remembers reaching for a peach because she wanted to save Bouyue from an illness and hoped that success would turn contempt into acceptance. She had believed her choice was for him, but found herself unable to resist once she reached the fruit and smelled it. Her recollection reveals the force Daji expects the peach to exert, and the earlier pattern through which a wish to help someone becomes a vulnerability.

Mulan does not consume the honey. The following morning, after a troubled night, she takes the flask from her sleeve and opens it. Its fragrance recalls her encounters with Daji and again leaves her in danger of being drawn into that experience. A sudden cold breeze interrupts the effect. Mulan empties the flask onto the ground and sees the honey burn a dark mark into the earth. That concrete damage exposes what Daji’s generous presentation concealed: the honey is poison, and Daji had intended to harm Mulan from the beginning.

The Jade Rabbit explains why Mulan found it so difficult to speak during her encounters with Daji. While Mulan held the honey, the White Fox could keep her from talking about her; it was an old trick that left Mulan able to speak only when the White Fox wanted her to. The Jade Rabbit confirms that eating the honey would eventually have killed Mulan. Before that, it would have prevented her from speaking freely and forced her to do the White Fox’s bidding. The honey was thus not a harmless treat or a medicine for the quest, but a means of silencing and control. The Jade Rabbit also suspects that the Unwanted Girl’s transformation into the Red Fox followed this same pattern.

The Peach and the Cost of Rescue

The Jade Rabbit distinguishes the peach from the poisoned honey. The peach is not poison: it is the Queen Mother of the West’s prized Fruit of Longevity, capable of curing ailments and granting as much as six thousand years of life. Daji’s claim that it could save Xiu was therefore not simply false. When Mulan asks whether the peach would keep Xiu alive, the Jade Rabbit says that it would—but only at great cost. He does not explain further, and Mulan understands the gravity of the warning from his manner.

This distinction makes Daji’s deception more intricate than a simple offer of a counterfeit cure. She directs Mulan toward a real source of extraordinary power, but withholds the consequences that make it dangerous to take. The poisoned honey interferes with Mulan’s speech and judgment; the peach presents a genuine possibility of saving Xiu while concealing the price. Together, the offers try to turn Mulan away from the Jade Rabbit’s search and place her rescue effort under Daji’s influence. Once the honey’s effects are exposed and the peach’s cost is raised, Mulan can recognize that Daji’s apparent assistance has been designed to ensnare her, not to guide her safely.