To Chau is a "Snake King," one of the scores of Hong Kong who have tamed through generations snakes to make soup out of them, traditional cuisine is believed to be good for health.
Yet the folks behind providing fresh snakes for the salty meal thought to accelerate blood flow in the body and maintain strong during the cold winter months can be ordered, with young people increasingly reluctant to take on a job that they see as tough and dirty.
"He's my boss, he supports my life," said Chau serpens has cradled a Shia Wong Hip, a popular shop that serves more than 1,000 bowls of hot soup snake on winter days busier.
Trained by his father in childhood to handle snakes, Chau, now in its first 50 years, assumed the business that he founded, serving a small bowl of soup to 35 Hong Kong dollars (2.8 pounds).
From boiling the essence out of the snake, chicken and pork bones, spicing with a variety of ingredients that include five types of snake meat, traditional southern Chinese snack can take more than six hours to make.
Still, as the cold deepens in the weeks leading up to Chinese new year and the year of the snake ushers in the 10 February, Hong Kong locals shaking inside small roadside shops like hers.
The thick soup is spiced with hints of Lemongrass, while the snake itself tasted like chicken but it's harder.
"Snake soup can help you stay healthy, and when the climate is cold helps keep you from getting the flu, said Stephen Lau reviews.
Soup stalls remain popular throughout the former British colony, retail stores are reduced to few viscous, such as the 110-year-old she Wong Lam.
Inside, more than 100 snakes lie quietly in wooden cabinets labeled "venomous snakes" as shots of an abacus echo through the dimly lit store.
Mak Tai-kong, 84, owner of the shop worked there for 64 years. He sells an average of 100 snakes a week to restaurants and shops of snake soup that might otherwise buy pre-butchered meat, but I prefer the freshness that he offers.
Over the decades, has trained about 20 people to become snake-handlers and said she has some real advice and tried to help the people to put aside their fear of poisonous creatures, including starting on snakes which tusks have been pulled, and so they are no longer dangerous.
"Then, after he has bitten a few times by a snake that is no longer toxic, he thinks, ' Oh, this is not painful, this is nothing, this is like being bitten by an Ant," Mak said.
"Then he will no longer be scared, and as he works the more he will get more used to it."
But new blood is hard to find. The youngest employee of the shop now has been there more than 30 years.
"There will be many. Firstly, is poor and dirty, and the smell of snakes, "Mak said. "Secondly, salaries are high. So many people do not enter the camp. "
Mak feels that his work is less about making money and more on providing a service to society of keeping alive a tradition.
Yet even fellow "Snake King" Chau says has no trained successors and indeed refused to do so.
"I killed snakes for so many years, but didn't really want to. Because there are fewer snakes now, "he said. "But I can not change a career. There is nothing else I can do. "
(Reporting by Wu of Venus; Editing by Elaine Lies and Paul Casciato)
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