XIANLING VILLAGE, China — Businessman Cai Yong thought it would be a good idea to buy 3,000 cobra eggs and hatch the snakes at an abandoned school building in homemade cages of plywood, brick and netting.
It wasn’t.
Cai’s plan to make money by selling cobra venom for traditional Chinese medicine fell apart when more than 160 serpents slithered through a hole in the wall and threw the remote village of Xianling into bedlam. Starting at the beginning of this month, cobras were seen in outhouse toilets, kitchens, front yards and the mah-jongg parlor in this speck of a farming community in southwest China.
“I saw one in the bathroom,” said Zhang Suli, 47, the wife of a local corn and rice farmer. “I was scared, and I started screaming.”
State media described Zhang pulling up her pants as she ran away from the toilet, but she made no mention of her state of dress during a recent interview.
The Mid-Autumn Festival holiday last week, when Chinese celebrate the season’s harvest moon, wasn’t an auspicious one for the residents of Xianling.
First, there was the cobras-gone-wild story, which veered between slapstick and terror. Then an apparent government clampdown followed, in which officials declared that most of the snakes had been captured and all was well, assertions many locals didn’t believe.
Perhaps more than anything, the episode is a reminder that no problem or locale is too remote for the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to enforce its notion of a “harmonious society” in which there’s no social upset. Even when it comes to cobras in the bathroom.
Walking up a path that led to the village amid small rice fields and rolling hills, Guan Xinyu paused to say local officials were more interested in clamping down on any sign of trouble than in rounding up the snakes. Like several others interviewed in the area, Guan said that while the 1,500-plus cobras that didn’t escape were hauled off, he hadn’t seen anyone trying to catch the ones that got away.
“The government is scared of people panicking because these snakes are dangerous,” said Guan, 64, who does construction work in the city of Chongqing, a little less than 50 miles to the north. “I know they didn’t catch all the snakes.”
Officials recently delivered snakebite serum to the village, though only the breeder has been hurt so far, and given lectures about cobras. The government of Shijiao issued a notice last week detailing how the snakes got loose and telling residents that almost all of them had been caught. A government-run newspaper in Chongqing carried a story with the same message.
All of which left Wei Yuanxiang with one pressing question: “The government says there aren’t any cobras left, so why are people still seeing them?”
Wei, 56, a corn and pig farmer, unfolded a government statement that said that of 160 escaped snakes, 159 had been captured and one was killed. It also said, without explanation, that a few might still be loose.
“The government just wants to get this matter finished,” he said.
Wei’s neighbor, Luo Lizhong, said he saw a cobra last Saturday, several days after the village was given the all clear. Pointing at a spade leaning against the wall — everyone in the area seems to have one at the ready these days — Luo said he slapped it on the ground when he saw the snake darting across his tool shed.
“When we go out at night we have to be careful,” said Luo, 58, a rice and corn farmer.
Reached by phone, the man behind all the trouble acknowledged he didn’t have a license to raise the cobras. Cai, 42, a farmer and businessman, said he got the idea to buy the eggs in August after he saw a program on TV and read a few articles about high demand for cobra venom in the traditional-medicine community.
“I didn’t take effective measures to keep them from escaping,” said Cai, who has been bitten three times by the cobras.
He knows villagers have reported multiple cobra sightings lately, but he insisted those weren’t his snakes.
Besides, Cai said, the government has told villagers all they need to know. “They educated people about keeping their lights on,” he said, “and told them not to go out at night to avoid being bitten.”