Lady White Snake and the fall of Leifeng Pagoda

At 1:40 in the afternoon of 25 September 1924, the Leifeng Pagoda on the south shore of West Lake in Hangzhou fell down.⁶⁷ The North-China Herald’s correspondent in Hangzhou remembered it as “the day of Gen. Sun Chuan-fang’s arrival”.⁸ Eugene Wang writes that crowds combed the rubble for relics and the police walled the site off. About two weeks later soldiers broke in and took the printed scrolls hidden in the hollow bricks; a larger band of soldiers followed, then the villagers.⁷

Lu Xun wrote about it in the first issue of the weekly Yusi, on 17 November 1924.⁹ The essay begins:

What he knew about the pagoda came first from his grandmother. A man named Xu Xian saved two snakes, one green and one white. The white one became a woman and married him to repay the kindness, and the green one became her maid. The monk Fahai hid Xu behind his seat at the Jinshan temple, the snake flooded the mountain to get her husband back, and in the end she was caught in a tiny alms bowl and buried under the pagoda.¹⁰ As a boy, Lu Xun wrote, his one wish was for it to fall. Now it had, and he asked who among the farmers and silkworm women of Wu and Yue did not take Madam White’s side against a meddling monk.¹¹ He guessed that his grandmother’s version came from a ballad called Yiyao zhuan, which he had never read.¹²

The oldest full version of her story, printed three hundred years before his essay, is much less kind to her.¹³

Eighty-four thousand scrolls

The pagoda was older than any of this. Qian Chu, the last king of Wuyue, had it built on Leifeng, Thunder Peak, a spur running down to the lake. The Database of Religious History dates the building to between 971 and 977; Wang thinks it was most likely finished in 976.¹⁵ The scrolls in its bricks carry one firm date. Their printed notice says that Qian Chu, King of Wuyue, made 84,000 copies of the sutra and placed them in the brick pagoda at the West Pass, in the eighth month of the yihai year, 975.¹⁶

Qian’s own dedicatory inscription, found at the site, says the pagoda was raised to hold a lock of the Buddha’s hair belonging to someone of the palace. Thirteen storeys were planned; money ran short and seven were built.¹⁷

Later writers called it Consort Huang’s Pagoda. Wang argues that no Lady Huang ever existed, and that the name is probably a slip for 王妃, “the king’s consort”. The Database of Religious History reads it as “Pagoda of the Imperial Consort” and links it to Qian Chu’s consort Sun, who died in 977.¹⁸

In the middle of the sixteenth century the pagoda burned. Wang dates the fire to 1553, during pirate raids; Wu Jieying gives Jiajing 34, 1555, and names Japanese pirates.¹⁹ The fire took the wooden eaves and stairs and left the brick core standing.¹⁹

Three stone pagodas in the lake

The snake woman is older than the link to Leifeng. A Tang tale collected in the Taiping guangji tells of a man, Li Huang, whose affair with a white snake in the shape of a beautiful woman ends in his death.²⁰

The first story to put her under a pagoda is “The Three Pagodas of West Lake” (西湖三塔記). The publisher Hong Pian printed it in a collection some time before 1547, according to Wang, or in the mid-sixteenth century, according to Balivet. How old the story itself is, nobody can show. Wang reports that most scholars place it in the Southern Song; Balivet gives the thirteenth or fourteenth century; Whalen Lai calls it an “Ur-myth found in a Song collection”.²¹

A young man of Lin’an takes a lost girl home and becomes the lover of her mother, a woman in white who kills the men she takes up with. A Daoist, the Perfected Master Xi, has heavenly generals beat the three women until they show what they are:²²

He sealed the three in an iron jar, pressed it down with a talisman in the middle of the lake, and raised money to build three stone pagodas over them. The story does not name Leifeng.²²

A saying in a guidebook

Leifeng first appears in the tale as hearsay. Tian Rucheng, who passed the palace examination in 1526, wrote a guide to West Lake, the Xihu youlan zhi.²³ Its entry on Leifeng, read here in the Siku quanshu copy, says:

Scholars read this note in different ways. Wu Jieying treats it as the root of the link between the snake and Leifeng, a link she says came from folk legend. Wang, despite the note, thinks the story was not yet tied to one pagoda in the mid-sixteenth century, and credits Feng Menglong with fixing it at Leifeng.⁴

The saying stuck to the building. Wang quotes the Qiantang county gazetteer of 1609: in the Jiajing reign the pagoda seemed to give off smoke, people said the two monsters were spitting venom, and a closer look found swarms of insects. Wu quotes the Qing writer Lu Ciyun, for whom it was the bodhisattva who set the terms: the snake could come out when the pagoda fell and the lake dried. In the drought of the xinsi year of Chongzhen, 1641, the lakebed cracked, smoke rose from the top of the pagoda, and people told each other the white snake was out.²⁴

Feng Menglong’s python

The oldest full version is Feng Menglong’s story “Madam White Is Kept Forever Under Leifeng Pagoda” (白娘子永鎮雷峰塔), chapter 28 of his collection Jingshi tongyan. The collection’s preface is dated the twelfth month of the jiazi year of Tianqi, the year scholars give as 1624.¹³

The story is set under the Song emperor Gaozong, in the Shaoxing era. Xu Xuan, twenty-two, works in a relative’s pharmacy in Lin’an, as Hangzhou was then called. At the Qingming festival, caught in the rain, he shares a boat with a widow in white and her maid Qingqing, and lends the widow an umbrella.²⁵ The silver she gives him turns out to have vanished from an official treasury, and later the clothes and fan she dresses him in turn out to be stolen; he is exiled twice. Daoist exorcists try her and fail.²⁶

On the seventh day of the seventh month Xu goes to burn incense at the Jinshan temple, near Zhenjiang. The abbot, Fahai, sees the two women arrive by boat through a storm and shouts at them; they overturn the boat and vanish into the river. Fahai tells Xu to look for him at the Jingci temple if they come back.²⁷ They do, and Fahai gives Xu his alms bowl. Xu clamps it over his wife’s head, and the monk questions her:

Qingqing, she says, is a green fish that spent a thousand years gathering its powers under the third bridge of West Lake.²⁹ Fahai forces both back into their true shapes, puts them in the bowl, seals it with a strip torn from his robe, and has a pagoda of bricks and stones raised over it in front of Leifeng Monastery. Xu Xuan collects alms until the pagoda is seven storeys high.²⁸ Then the monk leaves a verse:

The second line is blurred in the scan we read. Wu Jieying prints 江湖, as we read it; the verse in the later plays, as Wu quotes them, has 江潮, “the river’s tide”.³⁰ Xu Xuan becomes a monk at the pagoda and dies some years later, sitting in meditation.³¹ The whole ending is transcribed and translated.

Set this against Lu Xun’s grandmother. Feng’s Qingqing is a fish; the green snake arrives with Fang Chengpei’s play.²⁹ There is no son and no flood at Jinshan.² The Dragon Boat festival and the realgar wine belong to the eighteenth-century stage.³² And it is Xu Xuan himself who presses the bowl down.

A son for the snake

The oldest play that survives, Huang Tubi’s Leifeng Pagoda, was finished in 1738. It opens in paradise: the Buddha gives Fahai a small pagoda and orders the snake and the fish shut under a seven-storey copy of it. Xu Xuan no longer traps his wife; the monk’s guardian spirits do it. Like Feng’s story, the play ends with her under the pagoda.³³

Huang did not like what the actors did next. In a note quoted by A Ying and by Guo Yingde, he complained that meddlers had added a son for the snake who comes first in the examinations, that the new ending was all the rage from Wu and Yue up to Yan and Zhao, and that audiences should have held their noses at a snake’s son among the officials.¹ Who added the son is disputed. A Ying credited a script by the actor Chen Jiayan and his daughter. Wu calls it lost; Wang says it survives in later copies; Wang Shih-pe, as Balivet reports, doubts it was theirs at all.³⁴

Fang Chengpei’s version is the one that lasted. His preface is dated the winter of the xinmao year of Qianlong, which scholars give as 1771. He says the play is old and its author unknown, that the salt merchants of the Huai region staged it when the court celebrated an event in the empress dowager’s palace, and that he found its words crude and rewrote it.³⁵ One sentence dates the kindest scenes:

So the stolen herb and the son’s offering at the pagoda were already being performed; Fang kept their titles and replaced their words. In his thirty-four scenes Qingqing is a green snake, Madam White drinks at the Dragon Boat festival, fetches the herb, fights the battle on the water and meets Xu at the Broken Bridge, and her son comes first in the examinations and visits her at the pagoda. She is set free, and the pagoda is left standing for later generations to look at.²³² The preface ends with Fang’s view of the legend itself:

The preface is transcribed and translated. Storytellers carried the same plot. Balivet cites an edition of 1809 of Chen Yuqian’s ballad Yiyao zhuan, the “Righteous Monster” that Lu Xun thought his grandmother had followed.¹²

Who changed what

Arguments about the source

Balivet warns that no single version can be called the original.³⁶ Chinese scholars argued about origins from the 1920s on: Hu Shiying took the Tang tale of Li Huang for the source, Dai Bufan argued for the Song, Wang Xiang linked the snake to ancient totems and the goddess Nüwa, and Zhao Jingshen thought the story and the Greek Lamia shared a source in India.³⁶ The Lamia comparison goes back at least to Qin Nü and Ling Yun in 1933, according to Wu; Ting Nai-tung (1966) traced it to the Japanese critic Kuriyagawa Hakuson.³⁶ Whalen Lai looks further back still, to ancient myths of men meeting river spirits and to the old custom of marrying a girl to He Bo, the river god.³⁷

Bricks as charms

Lu Xun came back to the pagoda in a second essay, dated 6 February 1925 and printed in Yusi on 23 February. It starts from a letter by Chongxuan in the February literary supplement of the Jingbao newspaper. On a steamer, Chongxuan had overheard two passengers explain why the pagoda fell:⁵

One of the passengers, Chongxuan wrote, kept sighing that the Ten Views of West Lake were now one short.⁵ So the brick-digging explanation reached Lu Xun’s readers by way of two strangers on a steamer and a letter to a newspaper. Later accounts give other reasons for the digging. Wu Jieying writes that the bricks were known as demon-quelling bricks, kept at home to keep snakes and scorpions out of the silkworm rooms, and that a rumour gave them the power to bring sons. A 2024 article in the Dushi kuaibao gives a third: the hollow “sutra bricks” (藏經磚) were misheard as “gold bricks” (藏金磚).³⁸

Lu Xun cared less about the cause than about what it showed. Wang reads the second essay as treating the stolen bricks as the mark of a society that only leaves ruins.⁵ Near its end Lu Xun made a prediction:

Talk of a new pagoda had started before he wrote. On 4 October 1924 the North-China Herald’s correspondent passed on a rumour “that the gentry are going to rebuild the Thunder Peak Pagoda”.³⁹

Archaeologists began digging the site in March 2000 and opened the pagoda’s underground chamber on 11 March 2001; it held fifty-one objects.⁴⁰ The new Leifeng Pagoda, five storeys high, was completed on 25 October 2002.⁴¹