Chinese Officials Claimed 900 Snakes Including Deadly Cobras Escaped Then Catchers Pulled Out Thousands

Nearly 900 snakes, including deadly cobras, vanished into Chinese floodwaters when a breeding farm collapsed this month.

Villagers waded into the murky water with sticks and nets while officials insisted the danger was already under control.

Then the men actually doing the catching revealed a number that made the official story fall apart.

Floodwaters Swallowed a Snake Farm and Officials Called It Handled

A tropical storm named Maysak parked itself over China's Guangxi region in early July.

Reservoirs broke.

One dam breach alone killed 26 people in Hengzhou, the city where the snake farm sat.

At least 39 people are confirmed dead across the region and roughly 130,000 residents have been evacuated.

In the middle of that disaster, a commercial snake farm near Hengzhou went underwater.

Guangxi is the largest snake-breeding hub in the country, home to tens of millions of cobras, rat snakes and water snakes raised for medicine, meat and leather.

When the floodwaters hit, the farm's fences meant nothing.

Local official Wu Zhi played down the danger, telling state media the flood had already carried off most of the snakes before anyone could get a real count.

Villagers living through it saw something different.

One resident told the Associated Press that "the animals are everywhere, even in the water."

A woman bitten by one of the snakes could not reach a hospital in time because the roads were underwater, and she died.

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A Snake Catcher's Own Numbers Blew Up the Official Count

While officials downplayed the scale of the problem, ordinary villagers grabbed nets, fishing poles and stun guns and went looking for the snakes themselves.

One member of a volunteer catching crew in Hengzhou, a man identified only as Mr. Zhu, gave state-run Beijing News the real tally after two straight days of work.

His small team of seven or eight people had caught between 2,000 and 3,000 snakes.

That's two to three times the entire number the government said had escaped in the first place.

"We caught two or three thousand in two days," Zhu told the outlet, adding his crew had basically cleared the area out.

The snakes were not the only escapees.

A flooded zoo in the region lost more than 100 animals, including two zebras, a humpback ox, three miniature horses and dozens of tropical birds.

An animal shelter worker in Binyang county pulled nearly 200 cats and dozens of dogs from the rising water, wading the dogs through the current two at a time while the cats fled to the rafters.

None of that made it into the government's first press briefings.

It took foreign reporters and Chinese social media users comparing notes to reveal how badly the initial numbers missed the truth.

Guangxi's Propaganda Office Never Corrected the Number It Knew Was Wrong

Governments always know how to count the good news fast and the bad news slow, and Guangxi just proved it again.

The Guangxi regional propaganda office put out the tidy figure, 900 snakes, and state outlets like Global Times and CCTV ran with it for days.

It took a guy with a net and two days of actual work in floodwater to show the real number was several times higher, and not one of those officials ever put out a correction.

That is not a translation problem or a rounding error, that is a propaganda office picking the smaller number because it sounds better on state television.

The people who actually solved the problem were not bureaucrats issuing statements from dry offices, they were villagers standing in chest-deep water with sticks, doing the job themselves because nobody in Guangxi's government was coming to do it for them.

That instinct, take care of your own street because the people in charge are behind the curve, is the same instinct that built this country long before anyone waited on a press release to tell them what was actually happening in their own backyard.

Sources:

• Associated Press, quoted in "Up to 900 Snakes, Including Venomous Cobras, Escape into Village from Breeding Farm After Flooding in China," AOL, July 2026.
• Beijing News, quoted in "Torrential rains bring devastating floods to a Chinese city – and a snake invasion," CNN, July 9, 2026.
• Red Star News, quoted in "A colossal 900 snakes on the loose, swimming through floodwaters after severe flooding in South China," Discover Wildlife, July 2026.
• NBC News, "Dozens killed, snakes on the loose after flooding from days of heavy rain in southern China," July 2026.
• Global Times, "Around 900 snakes, including venomous cobras, escape flood-damaged farm in Guangxi," July 2026.