Bashe, the Elephant-Eating Serpent of the Shan Hai Jing

What the Shan Hai Jing says

Bashe appears in the Within the Seas: South book of the Shan Hai Jing, the part that lists peoples, lands and creatures along the southern side of the known world. The entry is short and vivid. The Ba serpent swallows elephants, and only after three years does it bring up the bones. Ba was the name of an ancient people and state in the region of present-day eastern Sichuan and Chongqing, so the name ties the snake to the hills and rivers of the southwest.

Two more details follow. A gentleman who takes the bones, most likely as medicine, will suffer no illness of the heart or belly, and the serpent itself is colored blue, yellow, red and black. Like many entries in the book, the line joins a wonder to a practical use: the beast is terrifying, but what it leaves behind is worth having.

A snake that swallows an elephant

The image was famous early. In the Tianwen, or Heavenly Questions, a long poem in the Chu Ci anthology traditionally credited to Qu Yuan, the poet asks how big a snake must be to swallow an elephant. The poem is a chain of riddles about heaven, earth and the past, and the elephant-eating snake sits among them as a wonder nobody could explain. Much later the same picture became a common Chinese saying: a heart that is never satisfied is like a snake trying to swallow an elephant, a warning against greed.

The long snake and Yi the archer

The Huainanzi, a Han dynasty book of philosophy and myth, lists the monsters that the archer Yi killed in the time of the sage king Yao. Among them is a long snake, the xiushe, which Yi cut apart at Dongting. Later readers often identified this long snake with the Ba serpent, and a local legend explains Baling, an old name for the city of Yueyang on Lake Dongting, as a mound formed by the dead serpent's bones. The Shan Hai Jing itself says nothing about Yi or Dongting; it only records the snake and its meal.

Bashe in Beasts of Shanhai

In Beasts of Shanhai, our browser game built on these creatures, Bashe is an Earth beast that grows the way the snake in the text does: by eating. Every time it finishes off a foe and survives, it gains health for the rest of the run, so a Bashe kept alive through the early stages becomes a wall in the later ones. For other serpents of the book whose appearance brings disaster, see Feiyi, the six-legged snake of drought.

Ba Serpent in Beasts of Shanhai

In our free browser game Beasts of Shanhai, Ba Serpent is a Earth beast that costs 2 Gold. Its skill is Devour. When it kills a foe and survives, it gains +0/+2 for the rest of the run. At two stars each kill gives +0/+4, and at three stars +0/+6.

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