The beautiful love story (well, actually kind of weird to the westerners) was also written with xihu, the west lake, as the backdrop. A young scholar one day ran into a beautiful lady with her maid. They fell in love, got married. However, the young scholar didn’t know that this wife was actually a snake (so was her maid) that had lived so long and acquired the ‘way’ to live long with magical power and also able to transformed into human.

Such love was forbidden to the eyes of the ‘righteous religious’, a monk represent (subtly) the tradition view that such marriage was unorthodox, insane, unheard of, unacceptable, ‘no one did this before’. Only speculative that the wife would harm him one day, no longer love him.

The scholar was scared and frightened and agreed to help the monk to deal with his wife. Only did he realise later that how much the wife had sacrificed to choose a life that was never in her plan, crazily in love with this young scholar only resulted turning against her.

I was at xihu for business trip. I believe that was 2004 Jan. Due to the drastic development in China, the weather had changed that some told me, Hangzhou, where xihu was located, had not been snowing for many years.

But that morning, the magical moment came in as a surprised. I was having my breakfast in the hotel cafe when someone was shouting, “oh look! It is snowing outside.” I quickly dashed out with my camera although I was freezingly cold. I walked across the street (I stayed at Shangri-la which is very close by to xihu) and just simply shot pictures. With only a simple digital camera, without any carefulness in getting views, and this is one I got which I really love it.