Chinese New Year 2025: Year of the Woody Snake

FLASHBACK: It’s 2013, the previous year of the snake, and I’m backstage at the Extraordinary Martial Artists of the World Lunar New Year Gala. Held by International Wushu Sanshou Dao Association and SYL Wushu Taiji Qigong Institute, this was a showcase of leading martial arts masters and grandmasters, staged at the River Rock Casino Grand Theater in Richmond, Canada. I’m there as a reporter and guest, but at the moment of this flashback, I’m backstage on a personal mission, something divergent from the show, and my target is a highly respected master of Snake Kung Fu who is just about to perform.

I am aiming for Master Helen Liang. I’ve been pursuing her throughout the event, trying to grab a private moment, but as one of the organizers and hosts, her dance card was overflowing. As awkward as it was, we caught a moment just prior to the beginning of the show. Fortunately, Helen is a good friend and one of the nicest people you could ever meet. Despite her overwhelming hosting responsibilities, she made some time to humor my peculiar request.

As I said, this was the previous Year of the Snake. Two years prior, TC Media International launched a campaign of video ads to promote our annual limited-edition commemorative Chinese Zodiac shirts. I came armed with a mock-up of what would become the 2013 Year of the Snake T-shirt where Helen was the subject of the T-shirt image, hoping she could demonstrate some of her famous snake style while wearing it for our next promo vid. Helen was featured in our Snake Fist Emei Style video too; there could not have been a better fit.

We caught that moment in a corner of the stage behind the curtain. It was oddly lit by theater spotlights, but I thought it would be dramatic. But that wasn’t the only obstacle. Helen had her hair done for the show. It was tied up in an elegant swirl, with a playful bang partially curtaining her right eye. How the heck could we get that T-shirt on her without messing up her hair?

I confess that I’ve always been a tad skeptical about snake style. I’ve not really practiced it, and what little I was exposed to I’ve long forgotten. Most of my impressions are based on live demonstrations and competitions I’ve seen, and of course, what’s in the movies (more on this to come). For all the effort invested in the practice, Snake Kung Fu seems more theatrical to me than practical – not that there’s anything wrong with that. I respect theatrical Kung Fu too (after all, we were backstage).

Nevertheless, the vocabulary of Snake Kung Fu feels limited to me. I get how the finger jabs with the hand mimic a striking snake and some of the coiling chin na. I get the tail-like whipping kicks. What about all those wiggly snake moves? I imagine that the serpentining body techniques have evasive applications or perhaps some sort of body check. As it turns out, they can also serve to wriggle into a tight place, like that T-shirt. For a moment, Master Helen looked frustrated and perplexed, but then she managed to slink into that T-shirt with nary a hair out of place. It was one of the most impressive applications of Snake Kung Fu that I’ve seen and won my respect for the style.

Unfortunately, after all that, the shot didn’t come out as well as I had hoped. The stage lighting played havoc on my shoot and my camera skills aren’t as well-honed as they should be now, much less twelve years ago. In the end, we did make that promotional video, but Master Helen’s part was short. That’s on me, not her. That video still lives on our YouTube channel alongside the other Zodiac T-shirt promotion videos. Take a look:

We produced Zodiac T-shirt promos every year from 2011 to 2020, skipping only the Year of the Goat. I remember having a plan for that video playing off the Yi Ji Kim Yeung Ma (“squeeze two goats stance” 二字拑羊馬) of Wing Chun but it never came together. Then after the pandemic, we shot one more in the parking lot of Tiger Claw) for Year of the Tiger. That was just me and Kevin Ho, our longstanding graphic artist. We don’t have a studio anymore, so we were literally out on the street. Well, the parking lot. Sadly, our TC Media video department died of covid too, just like our newsstand mag. Our former studio was sublet out, our equipment was liquidated, and our videographer was let go.

I doubt Kevin and I will be making anymore promo videos like that. Since TC Media has been reduced to just me, him, and Gigi Oh (who officially retired in 2018 but still returns to pitch in a lot), we all have plenty of other things on our plates. Perhaps one of our freelancers might do something, but we just don’t have the bandwidth at this time. If any Snake stylists want to make a Zodiac T-shirt promotional video, please let me know. I don’t have a budget for video anymore, but I could surely get you some free shirts. Reach out to me at Gene@KungFuMagazine.com.

The Commemorative Chinese Zodiac T-Shirt Videos

2011: Year of the Hare

2012: Year of the Dragon

2013: Year of the Snake

2014: Year of the Horse

2016: Year of the Monkey

2018: Year of the Dog

2017: Year of the Rooster

2019: Year of the Pig

2020: Year of the Rat

2022: Year of the Tiger

If you want to reminisce on the Extraordinary Martial Artists of the World Lunar New Year Gala, that was a great show (and I’ve been to a lot of Kung Fu shows). We covered it in The Extraordinary Martial Artists of the World Lunar New Year Gala, JULY+AUGUST 2013 Kung Fu Tai Chi and posted our photos on our dedicated facebook album).

And those 2013 shirts are no longer available. All our commemorative zodiac designs are limited productions. Once we sell out, they’re collectors’ items. But we’ve got fresh ones for this year.

Slithering onward.

Snake Kung Fu and Jackie Chan’s Transition

Kung Fu is infested with snake styles, snake forms, snake moves, and snake weapons. The snake is one of the five southern Shaolin animals. My first Sifu, Wing Kwong Lam, taught Hung Gar, and being a southern Shaolin sect, that has snake within its five animals, so I learned a tiny bit of that. Snake is also one of the animals in Xingyiquan. I practice Xingyi, but only the basic element fists now. I’ve forgotten the animals. Beyond that, I have a snake-bladed jian. It’s common slang for what would be called a flame-bladed or wave-bladed sword. But as I said, much of my impressions of Snake Kung Fu are based on movies.

The first notable cinematic Snake Kung Fu that stuck with me was in a Jackie Chan film. I surely saw Snake style in other earlier films too, but Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1978) was the first time it left a lasting impression. That film was a turning point for Jackie, the debut of his signature style of Kung Fu comedy. It was also the directorial debut of Yuen Woo-Ping, who went on to become the preeminent fight choreographer for Hollywood with his double-barreled films The Matrix (1999) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). Snake in the Eagle's Shadow was pivotal for both Yuen and Jackie. It was the steppingstone that launched Jackie’s slapstick acrobatic Kung Fu style, captured the Hong Kong box office, and went on to win the hearts of the world.

In contrast, a week after Snake in the Eagle's Shadow, Jackie released another snake related film, Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin. That was more of a traditional Kung Fu film of the period. Jackie’s character has a secret Kung Fu book, and everyone fights him for it. That’s it. It sets up a barrage of fight scenes, one after the other, and includes Nora Miao, the only actress who ever shared an on-screen kiss with Bruce Lee (that was in Fist of Fury (1972) just in case you don’t remember). The Jackie versus Nora fight is amusing if you can get past the harassing spanks. Beyond that, this more of a Kung Fu fan’s film. The plot is threadbare, and the fights are so gratuitous that if you’re not invested in the action, it’ll surely get tiresome. It’s a peek at Jackie when he was more serious, not much more because there’s often a comedic element within Kung Fu films. Nevertheless, this film is far more conventional for the time.

Nevertheless, at 24, Jackie Chan is truly amazing in both films. He’s in peak physical shape and his Kung Fu is miles above everyone he fights. He’s centered, acrobatic, and a beat ahead of every other actor and stunt person, delivering ridiculously long and complicated fight sequences with dozens of difficult moves per shot. That’s the Jackie Chan that won my lifelong fan loyalty. His Kung Fu was immaculate.

And if two movies in a month seems like a lot, Jackie drops four more films in 1978: Magnificent Bodyguards, Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, Drunken Master, and Spiritual Kung Fu. That was Jackie in the late 70s for you. He was delivering grindhouse films with shocking frequency, and his Kung Fu in all of these is simply untouchable. Nineteen-seventy-eight was a bumper year for Hong Kong Kung Fu cinema, and it was from that furnace that the meteoric rise of Jackie Chan took off.

Drunken Master cemented Jackie’s comedic Kung Fu style, relying on the exact same formula as Snake in the Eagle's Shadow – wronged underdog trains with a crazy Kung Fu master (played by Yuen Woo-Ping’s father Yuen Siu-Tien in both films) to learn some esoteric style with obscure training techniques, only to return and take revenge.

If you decide to celebrate the Year of the Snake with these films, watch Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin and Snake in the Eagle's Shadow out of release order. Given how they opened within a week of each other, the chronology of their premieres is inconsequential. In Snake and Crane Arts of Shaolin, Jackie’s performance is relatively orthodox for the Kung Fu genre. Jackie is extraordinary, but it’s just one of many great Kung Fu films of that period, and it was a time of many powerful Kung Fu action stars. In Snake in the Eagle's Shadow, the Jackie that we know and love is born. It’s like he sheds his skin and emerges as what will become Asia’s second global superstar.

Snakes in Chinese Martial Culture

Sun Zi speaks of a snake in his classic strategy treatise, The Art of War (Sun zi bing fa 孫子兵法).

“The skillful tactician may be likened to the shuai-jan. Now the shuai-jan is a snake that is found in the Chung mountains. Strike at its head, and you will be attacked by its tail; strike at its tail, and you will be attacked by its head; strike at its middle, and you will be attacked by head and tail both.” - The Art of War 11.29 Lionel Giles translation

Playing Devil’s advocate, I’m not sure how a real snake strikes with its tail exactly, just like I’m not quite sure what the combat application of snake wiggling Kung Fu is beyond squeezing in a T-shirt without mussing your hair (but that’s surprisingly practical). There’s debate about what a shuai-jan is. It’s shuairan (率然) in mandarin, which means ‘suddenly’ or ‘hastily’. Some believe that a shuairan is a common Chinese rat snake. Others believe it’s some sort of mythical beast, which makes the notion of striking with the tail more feasible.

Snakes infest the ancient mythologies of every culture. Whether it’s the Ouroboros wyrm, the hair of Medusa, the Aztecan Quetzalcoatl, or the serpent that tempted Eve, snakes have charmed their way into our cultural characters in diverse ways. Chinese mythology holds a special place for snakes too. There were the mythic gods Fuxi (伏羲) and Nuwa (女媧), divine beings with snake bodies that were the progenitors of almost everything. There was Jiuying (九嬰), the nine-headed baby, a nine-snake-headed hydra that terrorized China like Godzilla. Jiuying spouted water and breathed fire and had a wail like a baby’s cry. I’m trying to imagine Godzilla, or any of the Kaiju, having a baby’s cry instead of a roar. That sounds horrifying.

The Most Seductive Snake Story

My favorite snake tale (tail?) the one about Lady Bai, Bai Suzhen (白素貞), aka Madame White Snake. The Legend of White Snake (Bai She Zhuan 白蛇傳) is considered one of the Four Great Folktales of China. Some trace the story to the 9^th century, but it solidifies in the 16^th century, and over time, it grew into many variations. Lady Bai is a snake spirit seeking immortality who disguises herself as a human but then falls in love with a mortal. Beyond the star-crossed lovers, Lady Bai has a sister, Xiaoqing (小青 ‘Little Green’), who is also a snake spirit. There’s also often a Buddhist priest pursuing Lady Bai, like Van Helsing chased Dracula. The monk is Fahui from Jin Shan temple, and seeks to exorcise Lady Bai as a demon. Beyond the romance, Lady Bai and Xiaoqing aspire to ascend to human incarnations and consequently achieve enlightenment and immortality.

This idea of magical beasts spending thousands of years cultivating their spirits to become human or immortal runs through a lot of Chinese mythology. With the influence of Buddhist reincarnation and Daoist spiritual cultivation, the notion of incarnations levelling up is interwoven in many myths. It’s a compelling metaphor for how we all strive to reach mastery within our disciplines and the inconvenient obstacles that impede our progress, obstacles like lovers and adversaries. It can also be seen as a critique of Buddhist asceticism; Lady Bai is not necessarily evil. In fact, she aspires to enter the mundane human world, often sacrificing centuries of cultivated qi to help her human husband. Nevertheless, Fahui is bent on capturing and imprisoning her beneath some holy temple, akin to the Ghostbusters trapped ghosts in their containment units.

The Legend of White Snake is a magical fantasy, part of the Chinese Yaoguai (妖怪 literally ‘strange apparition) genre. Yaoguai a transliteration of Yokai in Japanese, and that’s a word familiar to any anime or manga fan (the ‘kai’ in Yokai is the same ‘kai’ as in Kaiju). Just like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter share wizards, trolls and elves, there’s a consistent mythological world underpinning the genre of Asian fantasy that is founded in Yaoguai tales. And while there’s some overlap between Yaoguai and Yokai, they are independent cultures. For instance, the Yaoguai world has Jiangshi (殭屍) which are hopping vampires while the Yokai world has Rokurokubi (轆轤首), which are beautiful women with extremely snake-like long necks that can extend many yards.

For the lastest Western take on the Yaoguai world, check out the animated Netflix series Jentry Chau vs the Underworld featuring the voice work of Ali Wong as the titular Jentry. Bowen Yang voices Jentry’s Jiangshi sidekick. It’s a loyal introduction to Yaoguai for western audiences.

The Legend of White Snake has been retold in Chinese opera, television serials, manhua (Chinese manga, another transliteration 漫畫), and my favorite, movies. One of my guiltiest Kung Fu movie pleasures is Green Snake (1993). Honestly, it’s more of a Yaoguai film than Wuxia, but those two genres are often interwoven. Consequently, Yaoguai cinema falls well within the purview of KungFuMagazine.com.

More Snake Films to Watch in Honor of the Year of the Snake

Green Snake was directed by Tsui Hark, a master of Wuxia and Yaoguai cinema. The ever-mysterious Joey Wong plays Lady Bai (Bai means white, just in case you didn’t know). Her sister Green Snake is the always demure Maggie Cheung. And the exorcist monk is martial arts star and real-life champion Vincent Zhao. It’s wonderfully campy with pre-CGI effects but nevertheless, achieves some eye-popping visuals. And all three actors totally sell the fantasy, replete with romance, humor, tragedy, and serpentine sensuality.

In the 90s, Joey Wang and Maggie Cheung are at the top of the divadom. And Vincent Zhou is brilliant as the obsessive Buddhist exorcist Fahui. From slinky titillation, the film moves into some big questions of good vs evil, delusion vs reality, emotion vs detachment, of sibling rivalry, and what it means to be human. Underlying the fable are some hard challenges for Buddhism, all wrapped in the slithery coils of Joey and Maggie as they sashay in their silken dresses, training for a glimpse of enlightenment. The opening imagery of the deformed humans in carnal crudeness, then the ring of the bell, the drop of water rippling as Fahui escapes into meditation, it's deeply Buddhist. And Maggie delivers a commanding performance that evolves from campy to vampy, to her perfect portrayal of trying to cry when you don't have emotions, to when she finally achieves tears. She's still got me mesmerized. The special effects hold up fairly well, even the snake puppets and prosthetics, all things considered. It's amazing how Tsui Hark achieved his visions without CGI. Best of all, there’s a swordfight between Joey and Maggie.

In 2011, Jet Li took over the role of the exorcising monk Fahui in It's Love a.k.a. The Sorcerer and the White Snake. It’s ironic because Zhao took over the role of Wong Fei Hung in the Once Upon a Time in China series after Jet left due to a break with the director, who was none other than Tsui Hark. The Sorcerer and the White Snake is CGI designed for 3D. Sadly I never saw it in 3D because I imagine it would be even better. 3D films can be cheesy, but I like cheese. The snake sisters have conspicuous boobs. That’s cheesy. Snakes don’t have boobs. That would make them mammals, not reptiles. Nevertheless, 3D CGI snake sisters with boobs is strangely entertaining.

The fights are all magical - lots of flying about and projecting qi blasts. There are sword fights, but they are magical qi-projection swords. They are more like Harry Potter wands than swords. Nothing wrong with that. Totally counts for sword fights. Unfortunately, the film feels dated now. It was a nascent merging of wire work and CGI, which comes off crude by today’s standards. Beyond that, the film is uneven, vacillating between a love story and an effects-laden actioner.

More recently, a trilogy of wonderful, animated feature film versions slithered out of Light Chaser Animation Studios, White Snake (2019), Green Snake aka White Snake 2 (2021) and White Snake 3: Afloat (2024). If you haven’t tuned into Light Chaser, this is a good starting point. The studio has created a ‘New Gods’ universe that retells classic Chinese myths with a modern flair. White Snake introduces the ancient Yaoguai world. Green Snake takes a sharp turn into a steampunk Yaoguai world that Light Chaser introduced in Nezha Reborn (2021). It almost stands outside of the trilogy because White Snake 3: Afloat picks up right where the original film left off. It tells a more conventional version of the legend, parallel to the 1993 and 2011 films with Fahui in hot pursuit of Lady Bai. It transforms the original to a sort of prequel to the well-known legend.

However you celebrate the Year of the Snake, whether it be watching a version of the Legend of White Snake, revisiting classic Jackie Chan films, practicing Snake Kung Fu, or just getting a new T-shirt, from all of us here at KungFuMagazine.com, Happy Lunar New Year!

恭喜發財!

Gung Hei Faat Choi!

Gōngxǐfācái!

The Chinese Zodiac Series

Chinese New Year 2024: Year of the Woody Dragon

Chinese New Year 2023: Year of the Wet Hare

Chinese New Year 2022: Year of the Soppy Tiger

Chinese New Year 2021: Year of the Iron Ox

Chinese New Year 2020: Year of the Iron Rat

Chinese New Year 2019: Year of the Dirty Pig

Chinese New Year 2018: Year of the Dirty Dog

Chinese New Year 2017: Year of the Flaming Cock