Snake’s Revenge

One morning, in the garden of a great scholar's household, a workman set his spade into the soft earth to clear a patch of brush. He felt the blade catch on something, and when he lifted it he saw what he had done: a nest of newborn snakes, cut through. Three small bodies. He buried them and thought no more of it.

But that night, the story goes, a white snake came down from the rafters above the scholar's bed. She did not strike. She only watched the sleeping house with cold, unblinking eyes, and a single drop of her blood fell onto the page of a book — soaking through exactly three leaves. Three deaths. Three generations. The mother snake had marked her debt, and she would wait as long as it took to collect.

The scholar at the heart of this tale was Nguyễn Trãi (pronounced roughly 'Nwin Chai'), one of the most brilliant minds Vietnam ever produced — a poet, a strategist, the man whose words had helped win the country its freedom from foreign rule. He was honest, loyal, and beloved. He was also, in the logic of the legend, the man fate had chosen to pay an old blood-price he never knew he owed.

Years passed. Into Nguyễn Trãi's life came a young woman of dazzling beauty and learning named Nguyễn Thị Lộ. She became his concubine and his confidante, prized at court for her wit. In the legend, she is the white snake reborn in human form — patient, lovely, and lethal — wearing the very face of the woman the household loved, the better to draw close to the man it loved most.

Then came the night that gave the card its name. The young king stopped to rest at Lệ Chi Viên, the 'Lychee Garden,' where Nguyễn Thị Lộ attended him. By morning the king was dead. The truth of how a healthy young ruler died in his sleep was never untangled — but blame fell like an axe. The court declared it murder, and the murderer, they said, was Nguyễn Thị Lộ, acting for her master.

The punishment was the cruelest the law allowed: tru di tam tộc — the execution of three whole family lines, three generations wiped from the earth. The wisest, most faithful servant of the realm was destroyed root and branch on a single accusation, in a single stroke. Three snakes had died under a spade. Three generations of a family died at Lệ Chi Viên. The white snake, the old tale whispers, had at last been paid in full.

History later cleared Nguyễn Trãi's name, and grieving kings restored his honor. But the legend keeps its harder lesson alive: that a wrong done and forgotten does not vanish. It coils up quietly in the dark, biding its time, until the day it slips back into the alley to claim what it is owed.