By South China Morning Post | Created at 2026-09-07 10:01:37 | Updated at 2026-09-07 11:18:00
1 hour ago
Despite being bitten nine times and losing a finger to its venom, 77-year-old “Snake Doctor” Chen Yuanhui remains on the front lines of researching and protecting the Mangshan pit viper, the rare species he discovered 37 years ago.
Originally from southern China’s Guangdong province, Chen graduated from a clinical college in central China’s Hunan province at the age of 19 and worked at a snakebite research centre.
The centre was discontinued in 1982, but Chen chose not to pursue a conventional career in the city. Instead, he settled as a snakebite doctor deep in the Mangshan mountain.
In 1984, Chen treated a forestry worker bitten by a strange venomous snake. Nicknamed by locals as the “little green dragon,” the snake was described as “yellow and green all over, with a white tail and patterns that look like squares when viewed from above and triangles from the side.”
Sensing that it might be a species that had never been officially recognised by the scientific community, Chen began searching for it.
After five years of searching, Chen heard that a worker had captured a nest of 23 snakes that matched the description of the “little green dragon.”
