Goddess of Mount Kunlun in the western mythological geography; goddess of immortality, fertility, and longevity; controller of the peaches of immortality (pantao) that grow on the cosmic Mount Kunlun and ripen every 3,000 years. The figure exhibits one of the most-distinctive iconographic transformations in Chinese mythology: in the earliest strata (Shanhaijing, c. 4th-3rd c. BCE), Xiwangmu is depicted in semi-bestial form (tiger-teeth, leopard-tail, jade-piped voice, dishevelled hair); in the later Han-Tang strata, she is rationalized into the imperial-court-style Queen Mother figure presiding over the peach-of-immortality banquets. The transformation reflects the broader Han-period rationalization of pre-Han mythological material into the imperial-bureaucratic-cosmological framework. The Tang-Song-period peach-of-immortality banquet narrative — at which Xiwangmu hosts the celestial gods at her Mount Kunlun palace and serves the peaches that ripen every 3,000 years — became a foundational topos of Chinese literature, painting, and theater (notably the Sun Wukong / Journey to the West episode in which Sun Wukong steals the peaches). Some scholars (Cahill 1993) connect the figure to broader Inner Asian-Eurasian goddess complexes (Saka/Scythian goddess parallels), reflecting potential Bronze-Age cultural-contact substrate.