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 got out of its enclosure. Afterwards he posted on social media that he had escaped death one more time.
The words “one more time” do a lot of work. In more than thirty years of studying this snake he has been bitten by snakes over twenty times, nine of them by the Mangshan pit viper itself, and two of those bites nearly killed him. He is 77 now, still on the front lines of researching and protecting the species he discovered 37 years ago. Down 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 started with a patient. Chen was born in Guangdong, finished at a clinical college in Hunan at nineteen, and worked at a snakebite research centre. When the centre closed in 1982 he did not take a city job. He went deep into the Mangshan mountains and set himself up as a snakebite doctor. In 1984, at the Mangshan forestry farm’s staff hospital, he treated a forestry worker who had been bitten by something strange. The snake, which locals called the little green dragon, was described to him 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. The five-pacer is large but brown. None of them fitted. In another telling of the same conversation, what caught his attention was the patient saying the snake was thicker than a wine bottle, with a whitening tail. Either way he arrived at the same conclusion: this was a species nobody had written down.
Then came five years of looking. 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 matching the description of the little green dragon. He kept it from his wife and spent the money the family had been saving for three years to buy a refrigerator, and bought the snakes.
He was thrilled, he later said, and mailed photographs off to provincial experts, but black-and-white images were not enough to settle anything. So he carried two freshly hatched hatchlings to Chengdu to see the zoologist Zhao Ermi. The hatchlings were too small to be conclusive. He went back to Yizhang, collected an adult, and made the journey 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 far they ranged, and the forestry farm at the time was promoting a slogan about making money by killing snakes. Chen went to the county leadership and argued for protection first, research second. It took the better part of a year of back and forth, but the appeal he drafted was eventually issued as a government document, which stopped the trade in killed snakes and spared the species from being wiped out almost as soon as it had been found.
The animal itself is worth the trouble. It is a nocturnal pit viper that reaches three to five kilograms and lengths of up to 203 centimetres, with a white tail tip it wiggles like a grub to draw prey within striking distance. Its venom clots blood and corrodes muscle tissue and can kill a person if untreated. Unusually for a viper, the female lays clutches of thirteen to twenty-one eggs and guards them until they hatch.
Chen bred them. In 1994 he produced the first captive-bred Mangshan pit vipers; in 2017 he incubated ten under simulated natural conditions; by 2022 he had bred 160, every one of them released into the mountain’s nature reserve. Half of some years he lived on the mountain, because snakes are nocturnal and he had to sleep outdoors and walk into the forest with a torch. Mangshan covers more than two hundred square kilometres, he said, and almost every inch of it holds his footprints. He carried tens of catties of gear: sleeping bag, tent, clothes, dry food, camera, video camera, papers, and four or five torches of different sizes, in case the batteries died.
The cost was not only his. His wife came close to divorcing him over the snakes. His daughter, worried about him, went four years after graduating without looking for a job, so she could go up the mountain with him and keep snakes at home. He and his family never left their 51-square-metre bungalow, and he bred the vipers at home. After the IUCN listed the species as Endangered in 2011, black-market prices reportedly climbed past a million yuan, about 150,000 US dollars, a snake. Chen turned down the offers, and when a snake 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 juvenile 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 the camera instead, because it was the first wild juvenile he had ever found and he wanted the first photographs and footage of it. He lost consciousness before he was off the mountain. The swelling climbed from his finger to his chest. The pain, he said, went into his bones and into his heart. Colleagues had already prepared his eulogy. His family kept giving him medicine on the principle that a dead horse might as well be treated as a live one, and after three days and nights he came back, minus half a finger.
There are still fewer than six hundred of these vipers alive, by his own count. As far as he knows, he is the only person in the world who has studied the species long-term in its native range, though the protection team now runs to three or four people. The work needs someone who is not afraid of hardship, or exhaustion, or 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 as a specimen in the National Zoological Museum of China, 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.