The Legend of the White Snake

The tale everyone tells about West Lake is much younger than it sounds, and it used to be a horror story. In the earliest Hangzhou version, printed around 1550, the woman in white has her guests' hearts cut out at table and ends sealed under three stone pagodas in the lake. In Feng Menglong's story of 1624 she has a name and a husband, but he is Xu Xuan, a drug-shop clerk rather than a scholar; her green companion is a thousand-year-old carp, not a snake; and she threatens to drown the whole city in blood. There is no realgar wine, no stolen herb of immortality, and no son. The compassionate version came later and it has authors. Around 1740 a troupe of actors bolted on the son who wins the imperial degree and frees his mother, over the written objection of the playwright whose script they were performing, and Fang Chengpei fixed the rest of it in 1771. Then, in September 1924, the real pagoda collapsed, quarried to death by people stealing its bricks for luck, and Lu Xun wrote that it served the monk right. This is the file of a story that keeps rewriting its own ending.

Hangzhou has been telling this story for at least five centuries, and it has never told it twice the same way. The version repeated on tourist signs and websites today — a virtuous snake spirit called Bai Suzhen, her green-snake sister Xiaoqing, a gentle scholar named Xu Xian, a jealous monk, and a son who eventually frees his mother — is about two hundred and fifty years old. Nearly every element in it can be dated, and several of them replaced something older and much crueller. What follows is the chain of texts, link by link. 1547 — a snake AND a fish. The earliest datable link between West Lake and a white snake is not a story at all but a topographical gazetteer. In the third chapter of his Xihu youlan zhi (Sightseeing Record of West Lake), the Ming scholar Tian Rucheng describes Leifeng: a spur of Nanping Hill where the consort of the King of Wuyue raised a pagoda, planned at thirteen storeys, cut to seven for lack of funds and later to five on the advice of geomancers, so that people called it the Consort's Pagoda. Then, in one flat line: "It is popularly said that there are two monsters in the lake, a white snake and a green carp, held down beneath the pagoda." A carp — not a green snake. Our own file had quietly lost the older of the two creatures. c. 1550 — the white lady eats hearts. In Xihu santa ji (Story of the Three Pagodas of West Lake), printed in Hangzhou by Hong Pian in his Qingping shantang collection, a young man named Xi Xuanzan walks out on the Qingming festival through Qiantang Gate, past Zhaoqing Temple and past the Broken Bridge, and rescues a lost girl called Mao'nu. Her mother, a woman in white, throws him a banquet at which two strongmen tie a young man to a pillar, slit his belly, take out his heart and liver on a silver dish and offer them to the guest with hot wine. He declines; the women eat. She keeps him half a month, then orders his heart cut out to make room for a newer man. Mao'nu saves him three times. His uncle, a Daoist, finally summons a spirit general who forces the three into their true shapes: Mao'nu is a black hen, the old woman an otter, and the lady in white a white snake. They are sealed in an iron jar and buried in the lake under three stone pagodas. There is no love in this story, no marriage, no husband worth the name, and no pagoda called Leifeng. 1624 — the tale gets its architecture, and its threat. Feng Menglong printed Madame White Is Kept Forever Under Thunder Peak Pagoda as story 28 of Jingshi tongyan. This is the version everyone means by "the old tale", and it is startling how little of our file survives contact with it. The man is not a scholar and is not called Xu Xian: he is Xu Xuan, twenty-two, an orphan working as a clerk in his uncle's herbal-drug shop at Guanxiangkou. They do not meet on the Broken Bridge: he meets her in the rain, in a hired boat, coming back from Baoshu Pagoda at Qingming, and lands at Yongjin Gate borrowing an umbrella. The green companion is called Qingqing, and she is not a snake — Madame White tells the monk that she is "a green carp of a thousand years from the pool under the Third Bridge in West Lake"; when she is forced into her true shape a carp ten feet long drops out of the sky and shrinks to a foot-long fish. The couple's shop is not a charity: Madame White's silver is stolen, twice, and Xu Xuan is convicted twice for it — first beaten and sent to a labour camp under Suzhou, then, wearing stolen headgear and a fan, given a hundred strokes and banished three hundred and sixty li to Zhenjiang. There is no Dragon Boat Festival scene, no realgar wine drunk by Madame White, no theft of a herb of immortality and no son. What there is instead is a threat, in her own mouth: if he betrays her, she says, "I will turn the whole city to blood; every soul will claw at the flood and tread the muddy waves, and all will die unnatural deaths." At the end it is Xu Xuan himself, not the monk, who claps Fahai's alms bowl over her head from behind and holds it down with all his strength. Fahai builds a small pagoda over the bowl, Xu Xuan begs alms until the seven-storey tower is finished, takes vows, and dies seated in meditation a few years later. The monk's closing poem is a warning against lust: "Had this old monk not come to the rescue, the white snake would have swallowed him whole." 1738 — the first play, and the son that its author hated. Huang Tubi's Leifeng ta, thirty-two scenes in two volumes, is the earliest surviving stage script. Huang softened one thing: he took the alms bowl out of the husband's hands and gave the capture to a Buddhist guardian. But the change that mattered was not his. In his own later preface, On Watching Leifeng ta Performed, he recorded what happened next, and the passage is the most valuable document in the whole chain: "No sooner was the draft finished than the actors insisted on staging it. Then some busybody tacked on the episode of 'Madame White bears a son who wins the degree', falling into the rut of the playhouse to please the audience's eyes and ears; it swept Wu and Yue and reached as far as Yan and Zhao. Alas! On the stage there is no happy reunion without a top graduate... But why is it absolutely impermissible in this play? Bai Niang is a snake demon, and to bring her into the world of caps and gowns — where does that leave me? I say the audience must hold their noses and flee her stench." The most famous element of the modern story was added by working actors, over the author's written objection, because a Qing audience would not go home without a graduation. 1771 — the version we actually retell. Fang Chengpei's Leifeng ta chuanqi, four volumes and thirty-four scenes, built on Huang's text and on a lost Chen-family playhouse manuscript, and it is here that the tale takes the shape our file describes. Fang added the scenes Duanyang (the festival wine), Seeking the Herb, The Water Battle, The Broken Bridge, Speaking at the Pagoda and Offerings at the Pagoda, and ended in comedy. He recast Fahai as a cold enforcer bent on breaking the marriage. He de-monstered Madame White into something close to an immortal. And he turned the green carp into a green snake — the sister our file calls Xiaoqing is 224 years younger than the fish she replaced. Note also the position of the Broken Bridge: in Fang it is scene 26, the reunion after the flooding of Jinshan, not the first meeting. The son, Xu Shilin, takes the top degree four years later, weeps at the pagoda, and moves Heaven to pardon his mother. When the guardian asks whether the tower should be torn down to release her, Fang's Fahai answers: "No need. Leave it for later generations to gaze upon; it also shows that the Buddha's power has no limit." 1924 — the tower answers back. Feng Menglong's monk had left a four-line prophecy: "When West Lake runs dry, when the rivers no longer rise, when Leifeng Pagoda falls, the White Snake will come forth into the world." On 25 September 1924, at about 1.40 in the afternoon, the pagoda fell. It had been standing since 977, burnt out by Japanese pirates in 1555, and it came down because people had been mining its base for bricks: the bricks contained rolled printed sutras, and because jing (sutra) sounds like jin (gold), "sutra bricks" had turned by rumour into "gold bricks", on top of an older belief that a Leifeng brick in the house kept snakes and scorpions out of the silkworm room and helped a woman bear a son. Lu Xun dated an essay on it a month later, on 28 October 1924, and his essay — one word long at the end, serves him right — turned Fahai from an enforcer of heaven into a meddling bigot and Madame White into the wronged party. He wrote a second essay on 6 February 1925 identifying the brick theft, and predicted that in prosperous times a new Leifeng Pagoda would surely be built again. Twenty-five years later the playwright Tian Han rewrote the legend for the modern stage; he threw out the filial son, made Madame White the embodiment of love rather than lust, and gave the last scene to Xiaoqing, who leads the creatures of the water in tearing down the pagoda. Lu Xun's 1924 essay had made the ruin a symbol of the patriarchal order; Tian Han put its destruction inside the story. The tower Lu Xun was glad to see fall was rebuilt, as he said it would be: founded on 26 December 2000 and completed on 25 October 2002.

Leifeng Pagoda (Leifeng ta), south shore of West Lake, Hangzhou. What you climb is a reconstruction, completed on 25 October 2002, raised on a steel frame with copper cladding and fitted with two hydraulic lifts and steel stairs; it is 71.679 metres from base to finial. The ruined brick core of the old pagoda that Lu Xun saw is preserved beneath it and is visible from a gallery, which is the most interesting part of the visit and the part the ticket photographs never show. Admission is a paid ticket separate from the lake itself (40 yuan for adults at the time of writing; check before travelling, since West Lake ticket policy changes). Opening hours run roughly 08:00–20:30 from mid-March to mid-November and 08:00–17:30 from mid-November to mid-March. The site is on the Nanshan Road side of the lake and is well served by bus and by the lakeside walking route; the lifts make the upper storeys accessible in a way the original never was. The view named in the classical list of Ten Views of West Lake is "Leifeng Pagoda in Evening Glow", so late afternoon is the point. The Broken Bridge (Duanqiao), north-east corner of the lake. Free, unticketed, open at all hours, and permanently crowded. It stands at the eastern end of the Bai Causeway, where Beishan Road meets the walk out to Pinghu Qiuyue and Gushan Island. Do not expect anything old: the present bridge is a single-arch stone structure rebuilt in 1921, 8.8 metres long and 8.6 wide, with a clear span of 6.1 metres. The name is far older than the legend — the Tang poet Zhang Hu already wrote of the "broken bridge, its moss rough and worn" in a poem on the Gushan temple — and its own classical scene, "Melting Snow on the Broken Bridge", has nothing to do with snakes. It is worth knowing, standing on it, that the Broken Bridge is not where the couple met in either the sixteenth-century or the seventeenth-century versions, and that in the 1771 play it is the place where they meet again, after everything has gone wrong. Jinshan Temple, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu. The monastery that Madame White floods in the later versions is a real and separately ticketed site about 150 km north-east of Hangzhou, on the Yangtze. It is where Fahai is traditionally placed, and where Feng Menglong sent Xu Xuan to burn incense against his wife's three conditions. A practical warning. No site in Hangzhou is the site of these events, because these events are literature. What Hangzhou offers is the geography the writers used — the lake, the causeway, the bridge, the hill — plus one modern tower standing over the ruins of the one that fell.