Bashe

The Bashe is a gigantic serpent of ancient Chinese myth that swallowed whole elephants and spat out their bones after three years, until the archer Yi slew it at Dongting Lake.

The Snake That Swallowed an Elephant

The Bashe, the "Ba snake," is named after Ba, an ancient region of the upper Yangtze in what is now Chongqing and eastern Sichuan. The Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas) says simply that the Ba snake eats elephants and spits out the bones after three years. Its colors are green, yellow, red, and black, or in another account it is a black snake with a green head. The book adds a practical note typical of that strange guide: a gentleman who eats its flesh will never suffer from illnesses of the heart or belly.

The poem "Tianwen" ("Heavenly Questions") in the Chu ci asks about a snake that swallows an elephant and wonders how big it must be.

Yi the Archer

The Bashe was finally killed by Yi, the great archer of Chinese myth, best known for shooting down nine of the ten suns that were scorching the earth. The Huainanzi, a Han dynasty book, lists the monsters Yi destroyed in the time of the sage-king Yao. Among them was a "long snake" that he cut apart at Dongting Lake. Commentators identified this long snake with the Ba snake. A later local tradition says the serpent's bones piled up into a hill, which gave the city of Yueyang its old name, Baling, "Ba Mound."

Appearance and Powers

The Bashe has no special magic in the old sources. Its terror is size and hunger: a serpent large enough to swallow an elephant whole and spend three years digesting it. It is more a monstrous animal than a spirit, like other giant beasts Yi killed for Yao.

Legacy

The Bashe lives on in a Chinese proverb about greed, "a person whose heart is never satisfied is like a snake trying to swallow an elephant." It also appears in modern Chinese fantasy and games as an enormous serpent. Unlike most dragons of Chinese tradition, which bring rain and blessing, the Bashe is one of the few purely hostile serpent monsters, closer in spirit to the dragon-killing stories of the West. See our page on Chinese dragons for the wider tradition.

Related

• Zhulong (Torch Dragon): Zhulong, the Torch Dragon, is a giant red dragon of ancient Chinese myth with a human face and a serpent's body, whose opening and closing eyes make day and night in a sunless land of the far north.
• Jiaolong: The jiaolong, or jiao, is a Chinese water dragon of rivers, lakes, and floods, often described as scaly and not yet fully a dragon, and feared for drowning people and overturning boats.
• Yamata no Orochi: Yamata no Orochi is the eight-headed, eight-tailed giant serpent of Japanese myth, slain by the storm god Susanoo after he got it drunk on strong sake, who found the sacred sword Kusanagi in its tail.
• Lóng (Chinese dragon): The lóng is the Chinese dragon: a long, scaly, usually wingless creature with four clawed legs that rules rain, rivers, and seas and became the emblem of the emperor and of Chinese culture.
• Chinese Dragons
• Dragon Legends

Sources and Further Reading

• Anne Birrell, trans., The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Penguin Classics, 1999)
• John S. Major, Sarah A. Queen, Andrew Seth Meyer, and Harold D. Roth, trans., The Huainanzi (Columbia University Press, 2010)
• Anne Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)

Cite this entry: “Bashe,” Draconika Encyclopedia of Dragons, https://www.draconika.com/dragons/bashe.