This is the Chinese melody the rest of the world learned first. A British embassy wrote it down in 1793, Puccini built the princess's theme in Turandot out of it in 1926, and it opens Chinese cultural events to this day. The words we print are the ones the tune carried in the Qing dynasty: a young woman in a garden, three flowers, three reasons not to pick them.
Read the structure and the song teaches itself: each verse is the same frame with one flower swapped in - jasmine, then honeysuckle, then rose
- and one fear swapped in - it will not bud again, the garden keeper will scold (骂, mà), the thorns will prick (扎, zhā). The archaic 奴 (nú) is how a young woman of the period said "I"; sing it as historical costume.
A provenance note you can hear: the version in most recordings, including learner videos, uses a 1957 revised text that is still under copyright claim in China, so our page keeps to the Qing text. Where the singer's words drift from the printed ones, that is the reason - enjoy the tune, read along with ours, and you are singing the older song.