General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Green Snake (青蛇)

Green Snake (青蛇) is a 1993 Hong Kong fantasy film directed by Tsui Hark, adapted from Lilian Lee's (李碧華) novel of the same name, which retells the Chinese folk legend the Legend of the White Snake from the perspective of the traditionally secondary character, the green snake. The film stars Maggie Cheung as Xiaoqing (小青), the green snake, Joey Wong as Bai Suzhen (白素貞), the white snake, Wu Hsin-kuo as the scholar Xu Xian (許仙), and Chiu Man-cheuk as the monk Fahai (法海).¹ It was released in Hong Kong on 4 November 1993, runs 99 minutes, and was produced by Movie Town (思遠) with the Shanghai Film Studio among its production partners.¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and screenwriters	Tsui Hark, with Lilian Lee as screenwriter; based on Lee's 1980s novel Green Snake¹^•²
Cast	Maggie Cheung (Xiaoqing), Joey Wong (Bai Suzhen), Wu Hsin-kuo (Xu Xian), Chiu Man-cheuk (Fahai)¹
Release	Hong Kong premiere 4 November 1993; first mainland China theatrical release 23 August 2025¹
Format	99 minutes, color, Cantonese and Mandarin, stereo sound¹
Awards	Three nominations at the 13th Hong Kong Film Awards (1994): Best Original Film Score (Mark Lui), Best Art Direction (Oliver Chui), Best Costume Make Up Design (William Cheung, Ng Po-ling)¹
Source	Lilian Lee's novella, itself derived from the Ming story "Bai Niangzi Yong Zhen Leifeng Ta" in Feng Menglong's Stories to Caution the World (警世通言)³
Restoration	A 4K digitally restored version screened at the Hong Kong Film Archive in 2026⁴

Spoilers

Story

The film is set in the Southern Song dynasty. A white snake with a thousand years of cultivation and a green snake with five hundred years are drawn by the spiritual light of Buddhist prayer beads and take human form as the beautiful Bai Suzhen and Xiaoqing. Bai Suzhen meets the honest scholar Xu Xian beside West Lake, enchants him with magic, but gradually falls in love with him and becomes pregnant with his child. Xiaoqing, whose cultivation is less complete, believes she can also seduce Xu Xian, and even flirts with the demon-subduing monk Fahai. When Fahai learns where the two snakes are, he seizes Xu Xian and takes him to Jinshan Temple. To save Xu Xian, the two snakes fight Fahai in a life-and-death battle.⁵

In the climax, Fahai holds Xu Xian at Jinshan Temple and forces him toward ordination. The two snakes battle Fahai at Jinshan Temple; during the flooding, Bai Suzhen gives birth and subsequently dies in the flood, while Xiaoqing saves her baby.¹⁷ Fahai, momentarily softened, lets the floodwaters reverse and drown Jinshan Temple itself, then turns away and leaves Xiaoqing, holding the baby, a path to survival.¹

From novel to film

Lilian Lee, a Hong Kong novelist, wrote Green Snake in the 1980s by reversing the usual narrative center of the White Snake legend: the green snake, traditionally a companion or foil beside the white snake, becomes the protagonist and first-person narrator.⁶ The novel derives from the Ming-era story "Bai Niangzi Yong Zhen Leifeng Ta" in Feng Menglong's Stories to Caution the World, but overturns the traditional text, adding romantic entanglements between the two snakes, Xu Xian, and Fahai, and ends with Xiaoqing seeing through human love after experiencing the world.³

Tsui Hark's adaptation follows the novel's plot in broad outline but changes the characters and the ending. The film softens all four leads, weakens the complex emotional entanglements among them, and removes the novel's epilogue in which Bai Suzhen falls in love again with Xu Xian's reincarnation. Commentators describe the film as moderating the novel's strong feminist leanings and its carnival-like expression of desire, turning the story into a question of "what is love, and what is reason?"³ The film also enriches the role of Fahai, who in the traditional tale functions mainly as the villain obstructing the white snake's romance; here his doubts about righteousness and his repression of desire make him a flesh-and-blood figure, and the film's theme becomes an indictment of human nature itself.⁷

Themes and visual style

The film's central question is what makes a human human. Critics place it within Tsui Hark's authorial sequence as an exploration of desire, of love against reason, and of good against evil, presented through imagery charged with erotic tension; snake and rain function as metaphors of desire.⁶ The contrast between the two snakes carries the theme: Xiaoqing, with the shorter cultivation, remains naive about human desire, while Bai Suzhen has a more mature, human-like understanding of it.⁶

Visually, the film is a showcase of 1990s Hong Kong fantasy craft: theatrical sets, saturated color, smoke, water, fabric, and stylized miniatures.⁸ The production design references Tang and Song dynasty painting; the snakes' mansion uses gauze curtains as walls to create an illusory atmosphere, and the costumes adapt the dress of the qingyi (virtuous female lead role type in Beijing opera) role type from Beijing opera to convey the snake demons' seductive bearing.⁵ One critic describes each composition as having its own hue and texture, with shots cutting as quickly as the image dissolves.⁹

Production and reception

A costly loyalty. According to a later account by Tsui Hark, Joey Wong complained that Taiwanese investors had offered her too low a fee; when the investors learned of this, they demanded that Tsui replace her or face withdrawal of funding and a boycott. Tsui broke with the investors to keep Wong, and as a consequence the large-scale Water Flooding Jinshan sequence at the end of the film fell short of what he had wanted.¹⁰

Contemporary reception was mixed. A 1993 South China Morning Post review called the film, despite its high-caliber cast and crew, "a surprisingly lacklustre affair," noting that unlike other Tsui Hark films it was no roller-coaster ride of stunts but more of a mood piece with big production values, filtered lenses, and off-beat characterization.² A Japanese study of White Snake films records that at its 1993 release the film drew both praise, for the success of adding modern ideas to a universally known story, and criticism that the special effects were overused and the story's construction disorderly.⁷ Later assessments have been warmer: the film is frequently praised for its cinematography and visual imagination, and it has been described as "not a great film, but most definitely great cinema."¹¹

The film earned three nominations at the 13th Hong Kong Film Awards in 1994, for Best Original Film Score, Best Art Direction, and Best Costume Make Up Design, without winning.¹

Later life and adaptations

The film did not return to mainland Chinese cinemas for over three decades after its 1993 premiere; it received its first mainland theatrical release on 23 August 2025.¹ The 2025 re-release drew attention among fans for its changes: the original title calligraphy was replaced, the Movie Town logo and opening dynamic shots were altered, several of Xiaoqing's snake-form effects were redone in CG, and the English names under the four leads' credits, which fans say Tsui Hark added as a gesture of support for Joey Wong, were removed.¹² A 4K digitally restored version, in Cantonese with Chinese and English subtitles, was scheduled at the Hong Kong Film Archive's 2026 "Fantasy Film Journey" program, in the same unit as Tsui's A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), and its screening sold out.⁴^•¹³

The novel has also lived on the stage. Director Tian Qinxin (田沁鑫) adapted Lee's novel into the stage play Green Snake, premiered in 2013, keeping the green snake's narrative viewpoint while shifting the story's emphasis; a 2026 revival added live multi-camera close-ups projected on screens, a dual visual register of full-stage views and screen close-ups, and color-coded lighting schemes for the human, demon, and Buddhist worlds.¹⁴^•¹⁵ The title has also been used for unrelated later works, including the 2021 animated film White Snake 2: Green Snake (白蛇2：青蛇劫起) from Light Chaser Animation, which continues that studio's separate White Snake series.¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Science fiction and fantasy films (individual works) › Science fiction and fantasy films of the 1990s › Released 1990 to 1995

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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