Village of the Serpents

April 7, 2020

SNAKES are no longer being blamed for the coronavirus, but we decide to travel to Zisiqiao, once the centre of China’s serpent trade, and see how forcibly the country’s wildlife trade ban is being enforced.

I drag myself to the train station, which is practically empty, and arrive in the city of Deqing about an hour later. The landscape near Deqing station is enticing: rugged, rocky and green, lined with glimmering waterways filled with yapping ducks. After negotiating my way through the screening procedures and going through a separate channel set up for foreigners, we hire a cab and take off into a flat and hazy suburban blur which soon gives way to Buick showrooms and brand-new towerblocks, some of which are unfinished. 

This is the familiar signature of the Chinese skyline, with cranes perched over construction sites like giant fishing rods. Amid the trucks and the SUVs, tractors and wobbly three-wheelers lurch into the highways and along the bike lanes, and there are flourishes of lush forest and lumpy hillocks and brown, bubbling brooks.

We are tailed by two black sedans, which make the same U-turn on the highway as we make our first stop at the Snake Culture Museum. I feel dismay rather than dread, and anticipate a period of tedious, obstructive bureaucratic stonewalling. But throughout the day, they maintain a discreet distance. 

The museum was closed, and had been for some time. The snake food enterprise next door was also locked down, its front gate supervised by an elderly security guard. On the other side of the road in Zisiqiao village, no one wants to talk. The snake enterprises are closed, the farms are deserted. The hives of wooden slats, where captive snakes were bred, are empty and abandoned. 

The set-up looks amateur, ramshackle. The slats are covered by slabs of polystyrene, each weighed down by two bricks to stop the snakes from escaping.   

Throughout Zisiqiao, a quaint village threaded with limpid rivers, we see no snakes. Not a single one. Every resident we ask seems to be on the defensive. “There are no snakes here.” The specialist restaurant has even removed the Chinese character for “snake” from its front sign. No sign of snakes, no snakes on signs.  There are no snakes here.   

Everyone is wary and defensive. Old men squat in their porches, picking at their fish nets, and the women flutter about and fall away whenever we try to talk to them. 

They push us away and shrink from our gaze, responding only with the scantest monosyllable. I can’t work out whether they are suspicious of foreigners, cowed into submission by the authorities or wary of giving any indication whatsoever that they are still engaged in illegal breeding activities.  

Those we get to talk merely repeat, “There are no snakes here.” One woman says they were ordered to stop at the beginning of the Epidemic and they are still awaiting orders to resume operations.

Another woman comes up to us and says, “Someone is looking for you.” And I make the strategic error of saying, “Who? A policeman?” That sends her and her neighbours into a little flutter as they contemplate the possibility that they have a fugitive foreigner in their midst. As a crowd of lumpy, cranky, boss-eyed villagers gather around and mutter in their local dialect, I start to worry that I am about to be driven out by pitchfork. 

But one still cannot disregard their fears of reprisals. A squat, scowling propaganda official was lurking outside the village, next to one of the black sedans we had already identified. 

We managed to turn things around and get the official on camera. He told us that anyone who violated the snake ban would face criminal punishment. He also said even if there is still illegal breeding, their sales channels have already been broken. No one will buy their meat, and they won’t make a living. 

We are then driven into the city to have lunch with the Propaganda Bureau chief, who turns on the obsequious charm and launches into a lot of schoolteacherish small talk about the local attractions and the way they were coping with the coronavirus (they only had a handful of cases). 

The real reason he wanted to meet was to persuade us to delay the publication of our story in order to avoid undermining the morale of ordinary people. We demur. 

After another stop at the restaurant, we return to Deqing train station and head to Hangzhou. I am coaxed through a separate channel, forced to fill in a form and tell them where I am staying in the city. I am marched from one desk to another and scrutinised by staff and volunteers who don’t seem to have the faintest clue what to do with me. 

Shuffled to a desk in the main hall, I complain as two bored station bureaucrats take photos of all my documents and train tickets, which are then sent to their “leader” for appraisal.

“We have to make sure there are no gaps,” one says.

About half an hour later, I am finally free to leave.

The attention is clearly on foreigners and the risk of “imported” infections. There has been a flurry of posts on social media about growing levels of xenophobia in China, stoked up by the government’s new focus on returning passengers bringing the virus back into the country. There was even a comic strip showing Chinese volunteers sweeping feckless “foreign trash” into the bins for failing to comply with anti-COVID-19 requirements. 

I don’t think anyone in the train station was motivated by a hatred of foreigners. Most of them were actually quite apologetic and seemed to understand the inherent absurdity of their rules.

“We have our procedures and we have to follow them,” one said.

In the end, they didn’t have the procedural flexibility to allow for the fact that I am a long-term resident of China and have not been out of the country since January 5. The colour of my skin or passport should have no bearing on their decision-making. Their prophylactic measures also failed to take account of the perhaps more salient fact that I was in Wuhan and Hubei on January 23.

But these kinds of overzealous measures appear to have worked. In the scheme of things, perhaps it is better to err on the side of bureaucratic sclerosis and sacrifice one’s right to unimpeded freedom of movement rather than risk a second wave of pestilence.  

Still, every train station seems to have different rules, and seems to be satisfying the whims of a local satrap rather than the requirements of the state. By contrast with Hangzhou, Shanghai had no screening procedures at all, and no one even checked our tickets. All we had was an officious station bureaucrat bellowing at alighting passengers through a loudspeaker, ordering them to remain in line and to walk more quickly through the gates.