One day in August 2019, Chen Yuanhui looked into a cage in a room in the Mangshan mountains. He wanted to see a young snake. Then something dark jumped at his head from above. He jumped back. It was a Mangshan pit viper, a snake with dangerous poison, and it was out of its cage. Later he wrote on social media that he escaped death one more time.
He said “one more time” because this happens often. He has studied this snake for more than thirty years. Snakes have bitten him more than twenty times. Nine bites came from the Mangshan pit viper, and two of them almost killed him. He is 77 now, and he still studies and protects the snake he found 37 years ago. In the small restaurants near the mountain, you only have to say “Snake Doctor” and everyone knows the white-haired man.
It started with a patient. Chen was born in Guangdong. He finished a medical college in Hunan when he was nineteen, and then he worked at a centre for snake bites. The centre closed in 1982, but he did not take a job in a city. He went into the Mangshan mountains and worked there as a doctor for snake bites. In 1984 he helped a forest worker. A strange snake bit the man. Local people called it the little green dragon. The man said the snake was yellow and green, with a white tail.
Chen knew the poisonous snakes well. King cobras are black. Bamboo pit vipers are green, but they are small. The five-pacer is big, but it is brown. This snake was different. He decided that nobody had written about this snake before.
Then he looked for it for five years. On every free day he walked in the mountains. He met bears. He got lost. But he never stopped. In 1989 a worker caught twenty-three snakes like the little green dragon. Chen’s family had saved money for three years to buy a refrigerator. He did not tell his wife, and he used the money to buy the snakes.
He took a young snake, and later an adult snake, to the animal scientist Zhao Ermi in Chengdu. In 1990 Zhao and Chen wrote a paper together and gave the snake a name: the Mangshan pit viper.
At that time, people on the mountain killed snakes for money. Chen went to the county leaders and asked them to protect the snake. After about a year, the government wrote a document, and the trade in dead snakes stopped.
Chen also began to breed the snakes. The first baby snakes were born in 1994. By 2022 he had bred 160 snakes, and he put all of them into the nature reserve on the mountain.
The ninth bite came on 18 August 2003. He was letting a young snake go, and it bit his left middle finger. The first three minutes were very important, but he used them for his camera, because he wanted the first photographs of this young wild snake. He lost consciousness on the mountain. After three days and nights he was better, but he lost half a finger.
Chen says there are fewer than six hundred of these snakes today. He gave one of his snakes to the National Zoological Museum of China. This year the museum said that a man let his two children play with it, and they damaged it. Chen said he was very sad. He did not understand why an adult let children play with something so precious. He said children do not understand, but adults should.