Imagine your favorite devoted romantic heroine, then discover that in the original draft she was a monster who dissolved her lovers into puddles of water. This deep dive traces the thousand-year biography of Bai Suzhen, the Legend of the White Snake, one of China's four great folktales, and what her extreme character rehabilitation reveals about shifting Chinese society from the Tang dynasty to today.

We start with the bleak Tang tale of a young man who smells raw and fishy before melting away, and the Song and Ming versions where the snake eats her previous lover's heart and liver. Then we watch economics rewrite the monster: Feng Menglong's 1624 story makes her a sympathetic wife whose stolen silver gets her herbalist husband exiled. The Qing dynasty adds an origin story with immortality dumplings, a jealous turtle reborn as the monk Faha ...