The White Snake Who Loved a Mortal Man

In the second year of the Yuanhe era, 807, a young man named Li Huang wandered through the East Market of Chang'an and saw a beautiful woman dressed in white, riding an ox cart. He asked her maidservant who she was and learned she was a recently widowed woman with no money. Taken with her, Li Huang offered her silk and coin, and soon found himself invited into her home.

There he met an old woman in blue-green who claimed to be the widow's aunt. She spoke of a debt of thirty thousand cash and offered the young woman's company in exchange for payment. Li Huang sent for the money and stayed three days. On the fourth, the old woman urged him home before his uncle grew suspicious. A servant who accompanied him noticed a strange, fishy smell clinging to Li Huang's body.

Back home, Li Huang fell ill almost immediately. He raved incoherently and told his fiancée he was finished. When his family lifted his bedding in fear, they found that his body had dissolved into water — only his head remained. Searching for the woman's house, they found nothing but a desolate garden and a single locust tree, with fifteen thousand cash hidden above its roots and fifteen thousand more below. Neighbors said the only creature ever seen there was a large white snake, coiled beneath that same tree.

This tale, called 'Li Huang', survives in the Tang dynasty collection Boyi zhi and is considered the oldest ancestor of what would become the Legend of the White Snake. A variant version, 'Another Version', changes small details — the protagonist becomes Li Guan, his head splits open instead of dissolving, and beneath a withered pagoda tree his family finds not one snake but a nest of small white snakes, which they kill.

Centuries passed, and the story kept changing shape. Around the Jiajing era of the Ming dynasty, between 1541 and 1551, a new version appeared in the Qingpingshantang Huaben compiled by Hong Pian: 'The Three Pagodas of West Lake'. Here the setting shifts to West Lake in Hangzhou, and three stone pagodas — not yet the famous Leifeng Pagoda — anchor the tale.