In Chinese culture, the snake seems to have an intricate relationship with the dragon, a symbolic emblem of the nation. Sometimes they could not be differentiated from each other, in other times snakes were widely believed to be a major prototype of dragons. Similar to the dragon, the snake was an important motif throughout the Chinese history, but different from dragons, snakes had fluctuating symbolic meanings.

Snakes were not unfamiliar to ancient Chinese people. In Shuowen Jiezi ("an explanation of Chinese characters"), a basic reference book on Chinese characters written in the second century, author Xu Shen mentioned how people feared snakes and greeted each other by asking if they had encountered any recently, indicating the frequent presence of such creatures in their lives.