The Legend of the White Snake

The story

This is the version most loved in China, born after the eighteenth century: the one in which the snake woman is a loving wife.

In Hangzhou, on the day when people go to visit the graves of their ancestors, the sky suddenly clouded over.

West Lake was full of boats. Families were heading back to the shore with empty baskets, boys were sheltering under the willows, and the first drops were drumming hard on the water. On one boat, among the hurrying crowd, a young man clutched an umbrella and gazed at the lake.

His name was Xu Xian. He worked as an assistant in a medicine shop. He was not rich, but he was kind, and he did not know how to say no.

That was when he saw two women on the shore, with nowhere to shelter. One was young and very beautiful, dressed in white. The other, smaller, was dressed in green and followed one step behind.

“Sir,” said the woman in white, “will you let us come aboard your boat?”

Xu Xian had turned red to the tips of his ears. He let them on. When the boat drew near the shore and he saw that the rain was not stopping, he lent them his umbrella. The woman in white said her name was Bai Suzhen. She said she would bring it back to him.

It was only the beginning.

Because Bai Suzhen was not a woman. A thousand years before, she had been a white snake, and for a thousand years she had meditated in a cave, perfectly still, until her mind had become clear enough to learn a difficult art: taking on the shape of a human being. Her friend in green, whom she called her sister, was not a girl either: she was an animal creature, just like her. They were two spirits who had come down to the city to find out what was so wonderful about the short life that human beings live with so much love.

Bai Suzhen soon found out. Xu Xian went to fetch his umbrella, and found her too. They met again. They talked for hours on the shore while the water of the lake sparkled. He told her about the shop, the remedies, the odd customers; she listened as if every word were a gift. Before long they were married.

They were happy months. They opened a small medicine shop of their own, and Bai Suzhen, who knew herbs like no one else, cured people the village doctor had given up for lost. One morning a little boy was brought in, burning with fever, and by evening he was laughing on the doorstep. People began to come from far away, with their baskets and their sick. At night, after closing, Bai Suzhen ground herbs in the mortar, and Xu Xian watched her without saying anything, the way you look at something you don't believe you deserve. He had never known such peace.

But not everyone was happy.

On the hill, in the Jinshan temple, lived a stern monk named Fahai. He was a learned, rigid man, who saw the world as a book in which everything has its proper place. And in his book, a snake could not live beside a man. One evening he stopped Xu Xian in the street.

“Young man,” he said, “I have seen the mark on your forehead. Your wife is not a woman. She is a monster, and one day she will kill you.”

Xu Xian laughed, uneasily. But he could not forget it.

The Dragon Boat Festival came round, at the start of summer. On that day it was the custom to drink a special wine mixed with a red-orange powder, realgar, which is said to keep away poisons and creeping creatures. Xu Xian, still troubled by the monk's words, poured a cup for his wife.

“You drink too,” he said softly. “It's the festival.”

Bai Suzhen looked at him. She understood everything. She could have refused, said she felt unwell. She did not. For love, she drank a whole cup, and then another.

The wine made her ill. She swayed, went to her room and lay down on the bed.

When Xu Xian opened the door of the room some time later, his wife was no longer on the bed. Something long, white and enormous, coiled on the covers, raised its head towards him and looked at him.

Xu Xian screamed. He fell backwards. His heart stopped beating.

Bai Suzhen, who had taken her woman's shape again, found her husband on the floor, lifeless. She knelt beside him. She wept. Then she dried her face and stood up, because a wife who loves does not give up like that, and went to look for what she needed to bring him back. They say she succeeded, at a price she would never reveal. Xu Xian opened his eyes again. He no longer knew what to believe.

That weakness was what the monk Fahai had been waiting for. He summoned Xu Xian to Jinshan. He gave him a metal bowl.

“When you go home,” he said, “put this on your wife's head. You need not say anything.”

Xu Xian went home. Bai Suzhen greeted him with a smile and a cup of tea. He hesitated, his hands icy, the bowl behind his back. Then, slowly, he set it on her head.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the woman began to shrink. Her shoulders narrowed, her hair drew back, her white dress crumpled. When Xu Xian lifted the bowl, underneath it was a small white snake, with bright, staring eyes, looking up at him.

The monk took the bowl with the snake in it. He went down to the lakeshore, where a pagoda called Leifeng stood, and shut her away beneath its foundations.

“She will stay here,” he said, “until the lake has dried up and the pagoda has fallen.”

Fahai meant for ever. Lakes do not dry up, and pagodas do not fall.

Xu Xian, they say, never lived as he had before. Many years later, according to some versions, the son born of their love, now a grown man, went to the pagoda to pray for his mother.

And then, one morning in 1924, the Leifeng Pagoda collapsed.

The lake was still full. But the tower had fallen, and for almost eighty years there was nothing on the hill to recall the seal. In 2002 it was rebuilt, more beautiful than before.

Anyone who goes to the shore of West Lake today, when it rains, can still see the umbrellas opening on the boats, one after another, like flowers. And there is always someone who looks up at the hill where the tower has been rebuilt, and wonders whether there is still someone inside.

Or whether, somewhere, on a rainy evening, a woman in white has found her umbrella again.