Legend of the White Snake: Bai Suzhen and Xu Xian

The Legend of the White Snake (白蛇传) is one of China's "Four Great Folk Legends", with the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, Meng Jiangnü and the Butterfly Lovers. It has changed a great deal over the centuries. Here first is the version fixed by modern Chinese opera:

• two snakes from Mount Emei (峨眉山), one white and one green, take human form as Bai Suzhen (白素贞) and her companion Xiaoqing (小青);

• by West Lake (西湖) in Hangzhou, in the rain, they meet a young man, Xu Xian (许仙), who lends them his umbrella; he and Bai Suzhen marry and open a medicine shop;

• the monk Fahai (法海), abbot of Jinshan Temple (金山寺) in Zhenjiang, tells Xu Xian to make his wife drink realgar wine at the Dragon Boat Festival; she turns back into a huge white snake and her husband dies of fright;

• Bai Suzhen steals a magic herb from Mount Kunlun that brings him back to life;

• Fahai keeps Xu Xian at his temple; the two women flood Jinshan to free him, but Bai Suzhen, who is pregnant, fails;

• the couple meet again on the Broken Bridge (断桥), where they first met; a son is born, and then Fahai imprisons Bai Suzhen under the Leifeng Pagoda (雷峰塔).

In some versions the son comes first in the imperial examinations, pays his respects to his mother at the pagoda and frees her.

The oldest tales linked to the legend are nothing like a love story. Under the Tang, the tale "Li Huang" (李黄), later included in the Taiping guangji anthology, tells of a young man who follows a beautiful woman dressed in white from the East Market of Chang'an. He spends three days at her house, comes home ill, and his body dissolves into water, all but the head. At her address there is only an abandoned garden, where a large white snake was often seen. According to Chinese Wikipedia, the moral of such tales is that a young man should not fall for a stranger's beauty.

Under the Ming, the publisher Hong Pian (洪楩) printed a storyteller's tale set under the Song, "The Three Pagodas of West Lake" (西湖三塔记). In it a lady in white keeps young men as husbands, then has their hearts and livers cut out and eats them. A Daoist master from Mount Longhu unmasks three demons, a white snake, a black chicken and an otter, and shuts them under three stone pagodas in the lake.

The setting is already there, West Lake and a pagoda that holds the snake woman down, but there is no love story yet, no Fahai and no Leifeng Pagoda.

The first complete version is a vernacular story, "Lady White Kept Forever under the Leifeng Pagoda" (白娘子永镇雷峰塔). It is chapter 28 of Stories to Caution the World (警世通言, Jingshi tongyan), a collection published in 1624 by Feng Menglong (冯梦龙, 1574-1646).

It is set in Hangzhou under the Southern Song. On a rainy day near the Qingming festival, Xu Xuan (许宣), who works in a medicine shop, shares a boat on West Lake with a lady dressed in white and her maid, Qingqing (青青). The lady says she is a widow. He lends her an umbrella, and going back for it is how he falls under her spell. She gives him fifty taels of silver that had vanished from a high official's strongroom: Xu Xuan is sentenced to labour in Suzhou. She joins him there, then other stolen goods she has given him get him sent to Zhenjiang, where she finds him again.

At Jinshan Temple the monk Fahai unmasks her, and she vanishes under the water with her maid. Later she threatens to drown the whole city. Fahai then gives Xu Xuan an alms bowl: pressed over her, it makes her shrink. She returns to her true form, a white snake three feet long, and Qingqing is only a green fish. Both are shut under a pagoda at Leifeng, and Xu Xuan becomes a monk.

The lady is already a little more than a monster: before Fahai, she pleads that she has never killed anyone.

Under the Qing, the legend moved to the stage. Huang Tubi's (黄图珌) play Leifeng Pagoda still ends with the lady imprisoned. In 1771 Fang Chengpei (方成培) reworked the story into thirty-four scenes and added episodes that became famous: the Dragon Boat Festival, the quest for the magic herb and the reunion on the Broken Bridge. His play, which ends with the son's visit to the pagoda, was presented to the Qianlong Emperor during a tour of the south.

In 1809 a sung ballad (tanci), the Yiyao zhuan (义妖传, "The Righteous Demon"), named her Bai Suzhen. By then, Chinese Wikipedia notes, the snake was no longer a demon who leads men astray but a loving and loyal woman. Xu Xuan became Xu Xian, the fish maid became the Green Snake, and Fahai grew ever less likeable: a novel from around the end of the Qing makes him the reincarnation of a spiteful toad. In the 20th century the playwright Tian Han (田汉) adapted the story for Peking opera.

Several things in the legend are quite real. Realgar wine (雄黄酒) is yellow wine dosed with realgar, an arsenic sulfide. It was traditionally drunk at the Dragon Boat Festival (端午节), and realgar was believed to keep away snakes, insects and evil spirits: that is why, in the opera, the wine forces Bai Suzhen back into her true shape.

The Leifeng Pagoda stands on the south shore of West Lake. It was built in the late 10th century under the kingdom of Wuyue. Its bricks were believed to ward off misfortune, so local people kept digging them out: the tower collapsed on 25 September 1924. The writer Lu Xun (鲁迅) wrote two essays about it, seeing in its fall the fall of the old order. A new pagoda, built over the ruins, opened on 25 October 2002.

The Broken Bridge (断桥), at the end of the Bai Causeway, is real too: legend says it is where Bai Suzhen and Xu Xian met, which made it the most famous of the lake's bridges.

The legend has also travelled beyond China. As early as 1834 the sinologist Stanislas Julien published a French translation, Blanche et Bleue, ou les deux couleuvres-fées. In 1958 the Japanese studio Toei made it into Japan's first colour animated feature film, in which, as in Feng Menglong, the lady's companion is a green fish. In 1993 the Hong Kong director Tsui Hark made the film Green Snake (青蛇), based on a novel by Li Bihua (李碧华).

In China two cities are tied to the legend: Hangzhou, with West Lake and the Leifeng Pagoda, and Zhenjiang, with Jinshan Temple. On 20 May 2006 the State Council published the first national list of intangible cultural heritage (518 items): the "Legend of the White Snake" (白蛇传传说) is on it under the names of those two cities, in the folk literature category, just before the legends of the Butterfly Lovers and Meng Jiangnü.