The Girl Who Volunteered to Feed the Mountain Serpent / 李寄斩蛇

The earliest Chinese dragon-slayer story — and the slayer is thirteen years old

From In Search of the Supernatural (搜神记), Book XIX — by Gan Bao (干宝, c. 286–336) · Retold by Cathay Tales

Every summer for nine years, a coastal kingdom in southern China had fed a twelve-year-old girl to the serpent in the mountain. In the tenth year, a girl named Li Ji volunteered — and walked up to the cave alone, with a sword and a dog.

The Story

In what is now Fujian (福建, the coastal province in southeastern China), at the foot of the Yongling mountains (庸岭 — Yōnglǐng), there lived a snake.

It was seventy or eighty feet long. Its body was as thick as ten men standing shoulder to shoulder. It came down from the caves and killed soldiers, killed magistrates, killed anyone who walked the mountain roads after dark. The local dūwèi (都尉 — a regional military commander, the highest-ranking official in the district) lost officers to it the way some posts lose them to plague. There was no army strong enough to drive it out.

The people tried cattle. They tried sheep. They sacrificed at the foot of the mountain in the proper way, with the proper words. The snake refused them all.

Then it began to speak.

It came to villagers in dreams. It whispered through the throats of the local mediums. It said, very clearly: Bring me a girl. Twelve or thirteen years old. Every year, at the first day of the eighth month. Or I will keep killing.

The officials — the dūwèi, the magistrates, the village elders — held meetings. They were appalled. They were also, eventually, practical. They began to look for girls.

The girls they found came from families who could not protect them. Daughters of household slaves. Daughters of criminals. Each summer the chosen girl was bathed, dressed in clean clothes, and led up the mountain to the mouth of the cave. The snake came out and ate her.

This had happened nine times.

In the tenth year, the officials began their search again, and could not find a girl.

In a county called Jiangle (将乐), there lived a man named Li Dan (李诞). He had six daughters and no sons.

When the recruiters came through, his youngest — a girl of about thirteen named Li Ji (李寄) — walked to the front of her family and said she would go.

Her parents refused. They wept. They begged. Li Ji explained her reasoning the way a tax officer would explain a ledger.

"You have six daughters and no son," she said. "A family without a son is, for all practical purposes, a family with no children at all. I cannot earn for you. I cannot honor the ancestors. I cannot even do what Tiying (缇萦) did" — meaning the legendary Han dynasty girl who saved her father from mutilation by petitioning the emperor^{[1]Tiying (缇萦) — a famous Han dynasty story (c. 167 BCE) in which a young girl petitioned Emperor Wen of Han to spare her father from a punishment of bodily mutilation, offering herself as a slave instead. The emperor was so moved that he abolished mutilation as a legal penalty. Li Ji invokes Tiying as the ideal of a daughter who saves her parents through extraordinary action — and uses it to argue that since she cannot match Tiying's achievement, her life is worth less.} — "I have no way to be useful to you. So I am eating your rice for nothing. I would rather die. And if I sell my body to the kingdom, at least there will be a little money. Isn't that better?"

Her parents would not hear it. They refused to let her go.

So she went anyway. She walked out of the house when no one was watching, and they could not bring her back.

But Li Ji did not walk straight to the cave.

First she went to the local magistrate's office and made two requests. She wanted a sharp sword, and she wanted a dog — specifically, a dog that had been trained to bite snakes.

She got both.

Then she went to a baker and ordered rice balls. Several shí of them — meaning many pounds, enough to feed a household for weeks. She had them soaked in malt and honey, until they were dense and sticky and sweet.

On the first day of the eighth month, she carried the rice balls, the sword, and the dog up the mountain. She arrived at the temple at the mouth of the cave. She sat down. She placed the rice balls in a heap right at the cave entrance.

Then she waited.

The snake came out at the smell of food.

Its head was the size of a qūn (囷) — a circular grain silo, the kind that holds a year's harvest for a village. Its eyes were the size of bronze mirrors two feet across. It came out fast, faster than something that big should be able to move, and it went for the rice balls first. The sweetness had reached it before Li Ji had.

While the snake was still feeding, Li Ji let the dog go.

The dog went straight for the throat.

The snake, distracted, half-buried in honeyed rice, could not turn fast enough. Li Ji came up behind it with the sword and began to cut. She cut into its back. She cut again. She cut a third time, a fourth. The snake convulsed. It tried to whip around. The dog held on.

The snake hurled itself forward, out of the cave, into the open courtyard of the temple — and there it died.

Li Ji walked into the cave.

Inside, she found nine small skulls.

She brought them out, one by one, and laid them in the open. She looked at them for a while. Then she said:

"You were all too gentle. You were eaten because you were afraid. I'm sorry for you."

That is what the original text says, almost word for word. 汝曹怯弱，为蛇所食，甚可哀愍 — "You were timid, you were eaten, I pity you." There is no triumph in the line. There is grief, and there is a thirteen-year-old standing alone on a mountain with a sword in her hand, looking down at the girls who came before her.

Then she walked home. The original is very specific about this: 缓步而归 — she walked back slowly. Not running, not celebrating. Walking.

When the King of Yue (越王 — Yuèwáng, the local sovereign of the southeastern kingdoms before full Chinese unification) heard what had happened, he made her his queen.

He appointed her father as magistrate of Jiangle. He gave her mother and her sisters land and gold.

And from that day, the people of Dongye (东冶, the capital of the region) say, no evil thing has come down from those mountains again.

There is still, somewhere in old Fujian, a song about her.

Translator's Reflection

This is the oldest dragon-slayer story in Chinese literature — and the dragon-slayer is a thirteen-year-old girl who walks up to the cave by herself because she has done the math and decided her life is worth less than a few coins to her family.

That sentence is hard to write. Read the original again: 卖寄之身，可得少钱，以供父母，岂不善耶 — "If I sell my body, I can get a little money to feed my parents — isn't that good?" She is not being noble. She is being efficient. She has looked at her circumstances and concluded that the most useful thing she can do with her body is to be killed for it.

And then she goes up the mountain and does not die.

I keep thinking about the rice balls. The whole plan turns on them. The sword and the dog are the weapons, but the rice balls are the brain. She figured out that this thing has a sweet tooth. She figured out that a snake that big has to be distracted before it can be killed. She figured out the order of operations: bait first, dog second, sword third. She was thirteen, and she was running an algorithm.

The part I cannot get out of my head is the cave. After the snake is dead, she goes inside. She doesn't have to. The story would work if she just walked down the mountain with her dog. But she goes in, alone, and she finds nine skulls, and she carries them out one at a time and says: you were too gentle, you were afraid, I'm sorry.

That isn't the line of a folk hero. That's the line of a child who knows she should have been the tenth skull.

The story was collected by Gan Bao (干宝) sometime around 350 CE, more than fifteen hundred years before Tolkien wrote about Éowyn killing the Witch-King. Gan Bao was an imperial historian. He started his collection of strange tales — Sōushén Jì, "In Search of the Supernatural" — because his older brother had appeared to come back from the dead, and he wanted to understand what kind of universe allowed that to happen.

This story is in Book Nineteen. It sits among other stories about monsters, transformations, and the occasional miraculous human. Gan Bao does not editorialize. He gives you the mountain, the snake, the girl, the rice balls, the skulls, and the slow walk home. He trusts you to feel the weight of it.

Reading it in 2026, the weight is still there.

Next tale: The Magistrate Who Went to Hell to Cut Taxes — a Qing dynasty county official refuses to keep paying tribute to the underworld, and goes down a well to argue his case with Lord Bao. → [Coming soon]