The Legend of the White Snake

At a Glance

• Central figures: Bai Suzhen, a white snake spirit who transformed herself into a human woman; Xu Xian, the herbalist she married; and Fa Hai, the Buddhist monk who opposed their union.
• Setting: Hangzhou and the Kunlun Mountains, during a time when spirits could take human form and walk among people.
• The turn: Fa Hai convinces Xu Xian to give Bai Suzhen realgar wine during the Dragon Boat Festival, causing her to revert to her serpent form, which kills Xu Xian from shock.
• The outcome: Bai Suzhen resurrects Xu Xian with a stolen herb from the Kunlun Mountains, but Fa Hai eventually traps her beneath the Leifeng Pagoda; years later, their son petitions the gods and she is freed.
• The legacy: Bai Suzhen’s imprisonment beneath and eventual release from the Leifeng Pagoda - a structure that figures as both prison and final image of the legend in Chinese folk tradition.

Bai Suzhen had cultivated her powers for thousands of years before she ever set foot in Hangzhou. A white snake spirit of considerable strength, she chose the form of a woman - graceful, kind-hearted, unremarkable to the eye - and came down among people seeking what no amount of solitary cultivation could provide. She wanted love. She found it quickly: a herbalist named Xu Xian, humble and decent, who had no reason to suspect the woman he married was anything other than what she appeared. They settled into a quiet life together. For a time, that was enough.

Xu Xian and the Realgar Wine

Fa Hai, a Buddhist monk with deep knowledge of the spirit world, took notice. He saw through Bai Suzhen’s human face and could not let it stand. The pairing of a man with a snake spirit struck him as a violation of the boundary between the natural and supernatural orders - something that would, he believed, bring harm to Xu Xian and disorder to the world around them. He moved deliberately. During the Dragon Boat Festival, he approached Xu Xian with a recommendation: give your wife realgar wine. The wine was a festival tradition, and it carried one additional property - it could strip away a spirit’s disguise.

Xu Xian had no reason to doubt him. He gave Bai Suzhen the cup.

The wine did its work. Bai Suzhen’s human form collapsed into her true one: a large white serpent, coiled on the floor where his wife had been standing. Xu Xian looked at her and died - not from a wound, but from pure shock, his heart stopping before he could understand what he had seen.

The Herb from Kunlun

Bai Suzhen did not grieve passively. She left at once for the Kunlun Mountains, where a particular herb - one capable of restoring life - grew on peaks guarded by immortals. She was not welcome there and she did not come with permission. She took the herb anyway, brought it back to Hangzhou, and used it to pull Xu Xian back from death.

He woke. She was standing over him in her human form again. He knew what he had seen beneath the Leifeng Pagoda wine’s effect, and he knew what she had done to bring him back. His forgiveness was not immediate or easy, but it came. They resumed their life together. Bai Suzhen was carrying their child.

Fa Hai’s Pursuit

Fa Hai did not consider the matter resolved. He watched the couple return to their life in Hangzhou and read it not as a love story persisting against odds, but as a problem that had not yet been properly solved. The union remained. The spirit was still in the city, still wearing a human face, still living as a wife.

He moved against them again, this time with finality. Drawing on his full spiritual power, Fa Hai cornered Bai Suzhen and pressed his advantage. She fought him - some accounts describe a battle that shook the water and sky around Hangzhou - but in the end she could not overcome him. Fa Hai sealed her beneath the Leifeng Pagoda, a structure near the West Lake, and the weight of it held.

Xu Xian was left with their infant son. Bai Suzhen was beneath the tower, alone.

Beneath the Pagoda

The years moved as they do - steadily, without regard for those trapped beneath stone. Xu Xian raised the boy, and the boy grew. He studied, advanced through the examinations, and became a scholar of some standing. By the time he was a man, he understood his own history well enough to take action.

He petitioned the gods directly: his mother was a spirit who had loved purely, who had crossed mountains and fought a monk and borne a child and been imprisoned for none of the reasons that merit imprisonment. The gods listened. They considered Bai Suzhen’s record - the years she had cultivated herself, the devotion she had shown, the fact that her deceptions had been in service of love rather than malice. They found grounds for mercy.

The Leifeng Pagoda released her.

The Release

Bai Suzhen came out of her imprisonment and was reunited with Xu Xian and with the son who had argued for her freedom. In some versions of the legend Fa Hai faces consequences for his rigidity - mocked by later spirits, diminished in standing, made to understand that his certainty had been a kind of blindness. In other versions he recedes without punishment, a figure of inflexible conviction who simply passes out of the story once his role in it is finished.

What persists in every version is the image of the Leifeng Pagoda and what it held. The tower stood by the West Lake for centuries after the legend took shape, and people who passed it knew the story of what had been locked inside: a white snake who had spent thousands of years becoming something capable of love, and who had found, in the end, that this was not enough to protect her - but not nothing, either. Her son had grown up to prove it was something.