Why did a snake spirit with a thousand years of cultivation become the most pitied woman in Chinese folklore? — Because she only wanted to be ordinary, and that is the hardest thing of all.
Crossing every divide, pursuing a true heart. Brave and pure devotion.
Love dares to cross all boundaries.
A white snake, a thousand years into her cultivation, took the form of a woman, Bai Suzhen. She met Xu Xian at the Broken Bridge on West Lake; an umbrella borrowed and returned became a betrothal; they married and opened an apothecary, healing the sick. Fahai of Jinshan Temple, declaring that humans and spirits must not mix, thwarted them again and again, until at last he sealed Bai Suzhen beneath Leifeng Pagoda. It is a story of whether the "other" can be accepted, and one of the most moving love legends of the Chinese folk — it gives its deepest sympathy to a woman who was not human.
At Qingming, fine rain over West Lake: Bai Suzhen and her maid Xiaoqing meet Xu Xian by the Broken Bridge; an umbrella borrowed, then returned, back and forth, and love quietly takes root. The opening is utterly human: no magic powers, only an umbrella, a rain, a road.
What Bai Suzhen wants is human too: an apothecary, a husband, a settled life. She cultivated for a thousand years wanting only to be an ordinary person — and that is the sharpest edge of the story.
Fahai saw through her true form, lured Xu Xian up to Jinshan Temple and forced him toward ordination. Bai Suzhen, with Xiaoqing, called up the waters and flooded Jinshan, battling Fahai — and harmed the innocent in the process. She defied order for love, and in defying it, hurt people.
Chinese folk tales rarely craft flawless leads. Bai Suzhen's courage and violence coexist; Fahai's discipline and cruelty share one body — no absolute villain, only positions that cannot be reconciled.
Bai Suzhen was sealed beneath Leifeng Pagoda; Xu Xian took holy orders; the family scattered. But the folk would not let the story end there: later opera gave her son the rite of sacrificing at the pagoda, and toppled it to free her — a reunion after all.
Lu Xun, in "On the Collapse of Leifeng Pagoda," read the tower as a symbol of oppression. A pagoda falling became the Chinese collective expectation that unreasonable rules will in the end crumble.