TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A large, venomous hundred-pace pit viper was spotted on Provincial Highway No. 20 in Taitung on Thursday.
Wang Lin-wu (王林霧), a member of the Bunun tribe and a sanitation worker for Haiduan Township, told CNA that he saw the snake slithering across the road. He said it was over 1.5 meters long and as thick as a woman's arm.
Wang and his colleagues used wooden sticks to guide the snake toward the guardrail and safely off the road.
Wang, who has lived in Haiduan Township for 40 years, said this was the first time he had seen such a large hundred-pacer. He described it as “quite beautiful” and shared that the Bunun people have legends that link the snake to friendship and peace.
According to a Bunun legend compiled by Pu Chung-cheng (浦忠成), former director of the National Museum of Prehistory, there was a man who went hunting in the mountains. His wife decided to make him a garment embroidered with hundred-pacer patterns. She borrowed a baby snake from a hundred-pacer mother as a reference for her embroidery.
Once the garment was finished, the snake mother came to retrieve her baby. However, neighbors who admired the garment design also wanted to borrow the snake.
The enraged mother hundred-pacer led her snake clan in an attack on the Bunun tribe. For 100 years, humans and snakes fought, resulting in heavy casualties on both sides.
Eventually, the leaders of both sides, human and snake, made a pact to avoid further bloodshed. The tribe agreed to lend their patterns to the Bunun people for their clothing, and the Bunun promised to respect the serpent.
According to Bunun historian Dahai (達亥), the hundred-pacer is the most important totem of the Paiwan people, symbolizing nobility and power. In Paiwan oral traditions, many versions of their origin stories involve the hundred-pacer as an ancestral figure.
Among the Rukai people, there is a famous legend of the Rukai Princess Baleng and a romantic union with the Snake King, a hundred-pacer. After enduring many trials to obtain the "seven-colored glass beads" as betrothal gifts, the snake married Princess Baleng.
The couple then vanished into the mystical Siiaoguei Lake, becoming part of legend.
