The standard account places He Xiangu in the Tang period, in a village in the south, the daughter of an ordinary family. At about fourteen or fifteen she dreamt of a spirit who told her to grind mica to powder and eat it, and did so. In other versions she is given a peach, or half a peach, by a transcendent she meets in the hills.
What follows is described in physical terms. She became light, needed no ordinary food, and could cross the hills at a speed nobody could match, going out in the morning and returning by evening with wild fruit she had gathered on distant mountains for her mother. She refused marriage and lived alone, and neighbours began coming to her because she could say what would happen and where lost things were.
The end of the story exists in several versions and they share a shape. Her reputation reached the court, in most accounts that of Empress Wu, and she was summoned; she set out, and disappeared on the road. In some tellings she reappears years later above a cloud, in others she is simply gone.
She is drawn as a young woman carrying a lotus on a long stem, sometimes with a ladle or a bamboo strainer instead, and occasionally with a sheng, a mouth organ. The lotus is a Buddhist emblem before it is a Daoist one, and it sits on her without comment, which is normal for the religious world she belongs to.