Snake Soup and Snake Shops in Hong Kong - and a bit of science

On 11 July 2018 an article in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that a a long-established snake restaurant in Hong Kong was to close. That was She Wong Lam, then located in Hillier Street, Sheung Wan. The restaurant, certainly in business by 1910, was in the fourth generation of Lo family ownership. The manager, in the business since 1948, having reached his late 80s, wished to retire. The family, having emigrated to Canada, decided to sell up.

The SCMP was accompanied by a video that can be seen on YouTube.

What people reading that article would not have realised was that the then head of the family firm had provided very useful information to John Romer on where Chinese Cobras (Naja atra, but then regarded as a subspecies of the Indian Cobra, N. naja) were being imported from and on the magnitude of the trade. In addition, She Wong Lam was also been the source of specimens used to study the reproductive biology of the cobra at the University of Hong Kong in the 1960s.

Snake soup is famous in Hong Kong as a winter ‘warming’ food and we were taken to She Wong Lam in early 1966 as newcomers to the zoology department in the University of Hong Kong. The SCMP reported that She Wong Lam had moved around Sheung Wan during its long history. In the late 1970s it was at 82 Jervois Street. However, I recall it being on one of the streets at right angles to, rather than parallel with, Des Voeux Road on Hong Kong Island. It could have been Hillier Street, the site in the 2000s but not in the late 1970s. The restaurant not only provided snake soup but snake gall bladder as well. We watched from the pavement outside as a snake, alive of course, was pulled from a wooden cabinet. With the head firmly grasped in one hand, the other hand, holding a small knife, was run down the ventral scales. That hand came to a sudden halt and with a tiny movement a small slit was made in the skin and body wall. The body was then pressed with the fingers and out popped the gall bladder which was nipped off and dropped into a small glass of Chinese wine. Gently rotated the gall bladder could be seen shedding the green biliverdin into the wine. The snake minus gall bladder was returned to a drawer, probably next in line for sale in soup. I am pretty certain that the snake handler was the manager in his late 80s, Mak Dai-kong, shown in the SCMP article.

We were fascinated by how the handler located the precise location of the gall bladder. We could not decide whether he felt and counted the number of ventral scales back from the head to the precise location or whether he felt for other structures in the body cavity to guide him. Whatever the method it was an impressive piece of precision surgery to witness, if not for the unfortunate snake. The SCMP stated that the knife used was devised by each handler. My best comparison is a Swann-Morton scalpel blade No.12—the one with the hooked end

Snake in soup we found indistinguishable from good chicken in consistency and flavour. In those days though She Wong Lam also served civet ‘cat’—the Masked Palm Civet, Paguma larvata, a species also traded throughout China but also native to Hong Kong. Coronaviruses had not then been discovered! Civet meat proved to be dense with a peculiar but not wholly unpleasant sweet, aromatic flavour. But that it another story.

A page from John Romer's Notebook held in the
Zoological Society of London Library

She Wong Lam appears in John Romer’s notebooks (preserved in the Zoological Society of London’s library). Romer clearly kept in touch with the then owner, Lo Shu Fai, and bought from him, for HK$24, an extremely pale-coloured Chinese Cobra on 16 October 1978. Lo told Romer that the snake probably originated in Kwangsi [Guangxi] and that he believed that only 1 in 100,000 received were of that pale coloration. One Romer had from Lo in 1958 was the only other he had seen in 20 years. Those numbers would imply that over a period of 20 years Lo had imported and sold 200,000 Chinese Cobras, or 10,000 a year. That is a lot of cobras going from the wild to just the one business in Hong Kong.

Romer asked Lo for his opinion of two other unusually but differently coloured cobras. The live snakes had been confiscated from an unlicensed hawker on 17 December 1979 and passed to Romer’s Pest Control Unit for disposal. When asked by Romer to examine the live cobras, Lo ‘seemed confident in his opinion that these these snakes had originated in Burma, having been sold by Burmese to Thai collectors in a Burma-Thai border area and then exported from Thailand to Hong Kong’.

With such a ready supply it is not surprising that cobras were used in a study of seasonal changes in the testis and the control of androgen and sperm production. They were brought to the lab in distinctive circular wire cages with a door in the centre of the top. I found a photograph on that most excellent website on the history of Hong Kong, GWULO. Cobras unfortunate to be caught for the food trade had their fangs pulled out at some stage on their way to the soup bowl. I do not know if that was the case in those sold by She Wong Lam to the university but nobody was taking any chances. Gauntlets (of the thickest imaginable leather) and long tongs were in evidence as Mr Leung, the senior animal technician and later chief technician in the department, despatched the snakes for their tissues to be collected. The bodies apparently did not go to waste but made their way to the cooking pot.

From Gwulo

Cobras were not of course the only snakes on sale. I bought a python now known as the Burmese Python, Python bivittatus, on 14 March 1967. Mr Mak, chief technician and general fixer of the zoology department, arranged it all and the python came complete with receipt bearing the legally required stamp duty of 15 HK cents from She Wong Lam’s shop in Kowloon (another branch of the restaurant). I reimbursed the departmental petty cash the sum of HK$29.40. The receipt though answers the question of where the restaurant in Kowloon was situated. According to the SCMP article in 2018, nobody a local historian asked could remember. It was at 117 Tung Choi Street in Mongkok. Another branch was in Wanchai, on the corner of Hennessy and Fleming Roads.

More recent videos and photographs from Hong Kong snake restaurants show mainly the non-venomous Beauty Rat Snake found over much of south and east Asia. It shuffles between being called Elaphe taeniura and Orthriophis taeniurus. In Hong Kong this snake has been found only in recent years in localised pockets on Hong Kong Island. Although Hong Kong is within the natural range of the species, there is the possibility or even strong probability that the populations have become established by escapes or releases from the food and/or pet trades.

The story of She Wong Lam does not end there. The restaurant on Hillier Street, complete with the old wooden cabinets to hold the snakes, can be seen in a video taken recently in Hong Kong by a ‘vlogger’ seeking snake soup. Indeed the shop can be seen on Google Earth still with Chinese characters for She Wong Lam. Perhaps the Lo family did not sell out after all or, if they did, the new owners kept the same name and the same line of business.

The SCMP article in 2018 makes the point that there are a number of other snake restaurants in Hong Kong, particularly in the Sham Shui Po and Yau Ma Tei areas in Kowloon (there are recent YouTube videos). However, it was Mr Lo (of whichever generation he was) of She Wong Lam who left his mark in the notebook of John Romer and in research in comparative endocrinology.

We should be in Hong Kong in November. I might go and have a look at Hillier Street and the old snake cabinets.