On a day in August 2019, Chen Yuanhui bent over a cage in a room in the Mangshan mountains to look at a young snake, and something dark came at his head from above. He jumped back on instinct. The thing that had lunged at him was a Mangshan pit viper that had escaped from its enclosure. Afterwards he wrote on social media that he had escaped death one more time.
Those last three words carry a lot of weight. In more than thirty years of studying this snake he has been bitten over twenty times, nine of them by the Mangshan pit viper itself, and two of those bites nearly killed him. He is 77 now, and still working to research and protect the species he discovered 37 years ago. In the small restaurants at the foot of Mangshan, you only have to say the words Snake Doctor and everyone knows which white-haired man you mean.
It began with a patient. Chen was born in Guangdong, finished at a clinical college in Hunan at nineteen, and then worked at a snakebite research centre. When the centre closed in 1982 he did not take a job in the city. He went deep into the Mangshan mountains and set himself up as a snakebite doctor. In 1984, at the staff hospital of the Mangshan forestry farm, he treated a forestry worker who had been bitten by something strange. Local people called it the little green dragon, and the patient described it as yellow and green all over, with a white tail and markings that looked like squares from above and triangles from the side.
Chen knew his venomous snakes. King cobras are black, bamboo pit vipers are green but small, and the five-pacer is large but brown. None of them fitted. In another version of the same conversation, what caught his attention was the patient saying that the snake was thicker than a wine bottle and that its tail was turning white. Either way, he reached the same conclusion: this was a species nobody had ever recorded.
Then came five years of searching. On every rest day he walked into the mountains. He met bears. He got lost. He never considered stopping. In 1989 he heard that a worker had caught a nest of twenty-three snakes that matched the description of the little green dragon. He said nothing to his wife, spent the money the family had been saving for three years to buy a refrigerator, and bought the snakes.
He was thrilled, he said later, and sent photographs to experts in the province, but black-and-white images settled nothing. So he carried two newly hatched young snakes all the way to Chengdu to see the zoologist Zhao Ermi. They were too small to prove anything, so he went back to Yizhang, collected an adult, and travelled to Chengdu again. In 1990 Zhao and Chen published a joint paper describing the animal, China’s fiftieth venomous snake species, as the Mangshan pit viper. Their description appeared in the Sichuan Journal of Zoology under the name Trimeresurus; the species is now placed in Protobothrops.
Naming it was the easy part. Nobody knew how many there were or how widely they ranged, and at the time the forestry farm was promoting a slogan about making money by killing snakes. Chen went to the county leadership and argued that protection had to come first and research second. It took most of a year of discussion, but the appeal he drafted was finally issued as a government document, which stopped the trade in dead snakes and saved the species from being wiped out almost as soon as it had been found.
The animal is worth the trouble. It is a night-hunting pit viper that weighs three to five kilograms and can reach 203 centimetres in length, and it wiggles the white tip of its tail like a grub to draw prey close enough to strike. Its venom makes blood clot and destroys muscle tissue, and it can kill a person who is not treated. Unusually for a viper, the female lays clutches of thirteen to twenty-one eggs and guards them until they hatch.
Chen bred them too. In 1994 he produced the first Mangshan pit vipers bred in captivity; in 2017 he incubated ten under conditions that copied nature; and by 2022 he had bred 160, all of them released into the mountain’s nature reserve. In some years he lived on the mountain for half the year, sleeping outdoors and walking into the forest with a torch, because the snakes are active at night. Mangshan covers more than two hundred square kilometres, he said, and almost every inch of it holds his footprints. He carried a heavy load: sleeping bag, tent, clothes, dry food, camera, video camera, papers, and four or five torches of different sizes, in case the batteries died.
His family paid a price as well. His wife came close to divorcing him over the snakes, and his daughter was so worried about him that for four years after graduating she did not look for a job, so that she could climb the mountain with him and keep snakes at home. The family never left their 51-square-metre bungalow, and he bred the vipers there. After the species was listed as Endangered in 2011, black-market prices reportedly rose above a million yuan, about 150,000 US dollars, for a single snake. Chen refused every offer, and when a dealer stole one from his pit, he moved the snakes he had bred into his own house.
The ninth bite came on 18 August 2003, from a young snake he was releasing, into the middle finger of his left hand. He knew exactly how precious the first three minutes are, and he spent them on his camera instead, because it was the first wild juvenile he had ever found and he wanted the first photographs and film of it. He lost consciousness before he was off the mountain. The swelling spread from his finger to his chest, and the pain, he said, went into his bones and into his heart. Colleagues had already prepared his eulogy. His family went on giving him medicine anyway, and after three days and nights he came back, minus half a finger.
By his own count, there are still fewer than six hundred of these vipers alive. As far as he knows, he is the only person in the world who has studied the species over the long term where it lives, although the protection team now has three or four people. The work needs someone who is not afraid of hardship, exhaustion, death or snakes, and who can bear the loneliness. Such a person is hard to find, he said, and he hopes to meet one while he is still alive.
One of his snakes ended up in the National Zoological Museum of China as a specimen, donated by him. This year the museum publicly criticised a man who had encouraged his two children to play with it until it was damaged. Chen said he was heartbroken and could not understand why an adult would let children treat so precious a specimen as a toy, and that the parent was entirely responsible. “Children don’t understand, but adults should,” he said.