This tag was created by Weiting Guo.
Healing with Water
As Paul Katz demonstrates in his pioneering study, “sending off the boat” is a common practice along the southeast coast of China. Due to fear of the spreading diseases, residents in various regions of Zhejiang and Fujian developed rituals of sending off boats into the sea. These boats carried statues of deities and the demons that were perceived as possessing plagues. As Katz points out, most of such rituals originated in Zhejiang during the Song dynasty (960–1279) and were often linked with the cult of Marshal Wen. Its underlying idea of plague expulsion derived from the Dragon Boat Festival and hence shared several beliefs and deities with the latter. Its practices also derived from the plague expulsion rituals that were performed by non-Han peoples in different regions across South China. Moreover, as Katz’s study shows, throughout the late imperial period local elites, officials, and merchants had played an important role in the spread of this practice, creating varying representations of the cult and different forms of rituals and festivals.
