‘Treading waves’ on the Qiantang River: an exploration of wave riding in Chinese history and literature

Abstract

During my academic years at the sinology department of Ca’ Foscari University (Venice, Italy) in the early 1990s, I kept bumping into detailed descriptions of tidal waves and references to fearless watermen – from the ancient state of Wu (located south of modern-day Shanghai) – who would tame them. At that time, I simply dismissed these as oddities. Then in 2006 I lucked into an enigmatic installation of about 30 wave riders displayed in the Bamboo Temple (筇竹寺 Qiong Zhu Shi), a Buddhist monastery in Yunnan Province (southwest China). The bass-relief, was dated 1880, decades before surfing spread from Polynesia to the West. Their perfect sideways stance, the stoked grin on their faces; it was a ‘different beginning’, disconnected from the Polynesian version of the sport. The temple’s abbot gave me the key into this fascinating story. ‘They are Buddhist Luohan (Arhat in Sanskrit), people like you and me who followed the scriptures and attained enlightenment. We call them 弄潮兒 Nong Chao Er, Children of the Tide.’ This encounter and those three Chinese characters ignited a decade-long research that culminated in my recent book. In this essay I will try to cast light on the 弄潮兒 Nong Chao Er and the activity called 踏浪 Ta Lang, Wave-treading, focusing on philological analysis of poems and dynastic chronicles from the Tang (618-907 AC) to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644 AC) and on first-hand accounts collected in Hangzhou, where wave-treading was conducted, often in secrecy, until the late 1980s.