For expert, snakes are his craft

Chen displays an endangered pit viper. He has healed some 600 people.[Photo by Liu Heng/China Daily]

A Mangshan expert continues his work with the viper that made him famous, Xing Yi reports.

A Ming landmark

Old wounds

He was the first to discover the Mangshan pit viper, an endangered venomous snake, and have it recognized as a unique species. He has been bitten nine times by the snakes, surviving each encounter but losing a finger after the last bite. Some people also call him "Dr Snake".

He is Chen Yuanhui, a grassroots expert on poisonous snakes.

Chen recently published his latest book, The Practical Treatment for Snakebites, which summarized his research on how to treat different cases, based on his past experience of healing more than 600 people - with a recovery rate of 99 percent.

In his Chinese-language autobiography Dance With Snakes: The Legend of Dr Snake at Mangshan, the former doctor at the Mangshan forestry administration's staff hospital tells his stories of protecting the endangered species since 1984, when he first encountered the deadly creature.

Chen was born in 1949, and when he was only 19, he went to work as a doctor in the mountainous Mangshan area in Central China's Hunan province.

Chen found the Mangshan pit viper in 1989 and together with Zhao Ermi, a herpetologist at the Chinese Academy of Science, had it formally identified as a unique species in 1990. That made Chen famous but also changed his life. Chen devoted himself to studying the endangered species at the administration's snake research center.

Because of the scarcity of the Mangshan pit viper, which has a global population of fewer than 500, the price for the snake quickly rose on the black market since it was identified.