It is counted as one of China's Four Great Folktales, the others being Lady Meng Jiang, Butterfly Lovers, and The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl.

The Tang-dynasty story collection Boyi zhi (博異志; "Vast Records of the Strange"), from the early 9th century, contains a chuanqi tale about a man named Li Huang (李黃) meeting an attractive woman clad in white (whose aunt is clothed in blue-green).

[2] In the Ming dynasty, some time before 1547, a collection of early huaben tales was printed by Hong Pian (洪楩); in it was "The Three Pagodas of West Lake" (西湖三塔記), likely the first work to set the legend in the Southern Song capital Lin'an Prefecture, or modern Hangzhou.

In this tale the White Snake tries to enrich her husband, but unwittingly turns him into a crime suspect; when he tries to leave her, she threatens him with a flood.

While Huang Tubi (黃圖珌)'s 1738 chuanqi play Leifeng Pagoda is considered similar to Feng Menglong's version, a major shift seemed to have occurred in texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Three long- or medium-length works from this period are: Fang Chengpei's (方成培) chuanqi play Leifeng Pagoda (1777); a thirteen-chapter novel (also Leifeng Pagoda, 1806) by Yushan Zhuren (玉山主人, "Master of the Jade Mountain"), and The Righteous Demons (義妖傳, preface dated 1809), a transcribed tanci text by Chen Yuqian (陳遇乾).

They become best friends and travel to Lin'an Prefecture (or Hangzhou), where they meet a young man named Xu Xian on a ferry-boat in West Lake.

Bai Suzhen travels to Kunlun, where she braves danger to steal a magical herb guarded by disciples of the Old Man of the South Pole.

When he reunites with his battered wife on Broken Bridge, where they first met, Xiaoqing is so furious at him that she intends to kill him, but Bai Suzhen stops her.

Lü Dongbin laughs and carries Xu Xian to the bridge, where he flips him upside-down and causes him to vomit the tangyuan into the lake.

In the meantime, the terrapin spirit has accumulated enough powers to take on human form, so he transforms into a Buddhist monk called Fahai.

Twenty years after his mother is buried under the pagoda, Xu Mengjiao earns the position of zhuangyuan (top scholar) in the imperial examination and returns home in glory to visit his parents.

At the same time, Xiaoqing, who had spent the intervening years refining her powers, goes to the Jinshan Temple to confront Fahai and defeats him.