Bashe (巴蛇)

Region/Culture: East Asia / China
Mythos: Chinese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A python-like serpent so vast it could swallow an elephant whole and take three years to disgorge the bones.
Role in Mythos: It serves as the south’s archetypal devouring monster, slain by the hero-archer Houyi and remembered in the idiom for bottomless greed.
Relation to Humans: People feared it as a swallower of large animals yet prized its remains, since taking a dose of the snake was said to guard against diseases of the heart and belly. It was finally treated as an evil to be cleared from the land by a divine archer.

For three years the snake barely moves. Somewhere in the wet southern country that the old geography calls the Land of Bigsnake, it lies coiled and swollen around the shape of a whole elephant, scales stretched tight over a meal too large for any natural throat. It waits. The bones take that long to come loose, working their way out slowly from between the scales until they fall clean and white onto the ground. Only then is the snake light enough to hunt again, and hungry enough to want to.

The texts cannot quite agree on its color. The Classic of Mountains and Seas, in the chapter on the regions south of the seas, says the snakes of that land come green or yellow or scarlet or black, and adds, almost as an afterthought from a second hand, that the black ones have green heads. Length is where the descriptions slip loose from anything a body could hold. The fourth-century scholar Guo Pu, annotating the same passage, set its measure at a hundred xun, something close to nine hundred feet of muscle, and compared it to the great pythons of the south that wind around a tree trunk after a heavy meal and squeeze the skeleton of their prey out through their own scales. Real pythons reach perhaps thirty feet. The gap between thirty feet and nine hundred is where the bashe lives.

That gap is probably the whole secret of it. The character ba began as a picture, an old oracle-bone and seal-script drawing of a long-tailed snake, and the early dictionary Shuowen Jiezi glosses it plainly: a creature, and some say a snake that eats elephants. The same syllable named the state of Ba in what is now eastern Sichuan, deep in the humid south where the constricting snakes actually grew large. A southern traveler watching a python crush a deer and lie torpid for weeks afterward would not have to lie very much to come home with the bashe. The myth is an honest observation stretched to the breaking point.

The poet Qu Yuan put the creature into one of the strangest poems in the Chinese canon, the Heavenly Questions, a long chain of riddles flung at the sky with no answers attached. Among hornless dragons that carry bears for sport and a serpent with nine heads, he asks how the snake that can swallow an elephant manages to digest its bones. He is not really asking. The question is the marvel, and the marvel is the arithmetic of it, a body that takes an animal larger than itself and spends years undoing the act of having eaten.

People wanted the snake even so. The Mountains and Seas passage records that gentlemen would take a dose of it, flesh or the disgorged bones depending on which reader you trust, and never again suffer disease of the heart or the belly. The logic is the old logic of sympathetic medicine. A thing that can dissolve an elephant from the inside might be persuaded to settle a human stomach. The 1578 pharmacopoeia Bencao Gangmu still listed it among the uses of the python, repeating the line about the bones emitted every three years as though it were a recipe.

The other thing the bashe became was a warning. The idiom bashetunxiang, the ba-snake gulping down the elephant, means a greed with no floor to it, an appetite that reaches past what it can ever hold. It is the snake that overreaches, that swallows more than its own length and then lies helpless for years paying the cost. A snake that eats an elephant spends most of its life unable to move.

Its end belongs to the archer Houyi, the same hero who shot the nine extra suns out of a scorched sky. He came down, the folklorist Wolfram Eberhard noted, to clear the world of its evils, and one of them was a monstrous serpent in Lake Dongting, the long snake, the adorned snake, the bashe under another of its names. He killed it in the lake. Its corpse was so enormous that the bones, heaped where they fell, raised a hill on the shore, and the place took its name from that mound. The town that grew there, the old Baling and the modern Yueyang on the edge of Dongting, still carries the memory of a snake’s skeleton in its ground.

What the bashe could do was simple and total. It ate. Size was its only weapon and its only argument, the capacity to take in a creature that should by every rule have been too big, and a digestion patient enough to wait out three years of immobility before doing it again. Its bones outlived it as medicine and as a place name. But the same size was the flaw stitched into it. A body stretched around an elephant is slow, blind to ambush, anchored in one spot while the meal comes apart. The hero found it in the water and it could not flee. Greed had given it the elephant and taken its speed, and when the arrow came there was nowhere for nine hundred feet of full snake to go.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Bashe?

The Bashe is a giant python-like serpent from Chinese mythology, famous for swallowing elephants whole. According to the Classic of Mountains and Seas, it would take three years to digest an elephant before disgorging the bones. It is one of the best-known monsters from China’s early mytho-geographic texts.

Did the Bashe really eat elephants?

In the myth, yes. The Bashe was said to swallow an entire elephant and then spend three years passing the skeleton out from between its scales. The image is widely understood to be an exaggeration of real southern Chinese pythons, which crush and swallow large prey and then lie motionless for long periods while digesting.

Who killed the Bashe?

The hero-archer Houyi killed the Bashe, the same figure who shot down nine of the ten suns. He slew a monstrous serpent in Lake Dongting whose piled-up bones formed a hill, giving the nearby place its old name, Baling, in present-day Yueyang.

What does the idiom “Bashe swallows an elephant” mean?

The four-character idiom bashetunxiang, “the ba-snake gulping down an elephant,” describes insatiable, bottomless greed. It refers to wanting far more than one can possibly hold or use, just as the snake takes in prey larger than itself and is left immobilized by the act.

Why did people use the Bashe as medicine?

Early texts claimed that taking a dose of the Bashe, its flesh or the elephant bones it disgorged, would protect a person from diseases of the heart and belly. This reflects sympathetic magic: a creature able to dissolve an elephant from within was thought able to cure human ailments of the gut.