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 in many regions of South China. Due to fear of the spreading diseases, residents in various provinces such as Zhejiang and Fujian developed rituals of sending off boats into the water. Despite regional variation, many rituals sent off boats that carried wines, paper money, and food offerings. Some boats carried the statues of plague-related deities and their soldiers; others carried items representing plague demons. 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 or the relevant beliefs. Their underlying idea of plague expulsion were closely associated with the Dragon Boat Festival and hence shared several beliefs and deities with the latter. Many 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.
In Wenzhou as well as many coastal regions, the ritual of “sending off the boat” aims to send away the epidemics with water. People usually placed a paper in the boat listing the names of the plague deities and the nature of the rituals. They worshipped the deities, casted spells, patrolled the streets, and burnt paper money. In some regions and historical periods, people used paper boats or miniature boats for the ritual. In other regions, people built large and beautifully decorated plague boats and placed ritual materials, paper money, and sacred items on them. At the end of the rituals, people either set the boats afloat or burned them on the shore. In Wenzhou, people sometimes floated the boat for a while and then set it afire, and sometimes set it afire right upon the boat was set afloat. In some regions, people sent a small boat to monitor where the plague boat was going; in others, people let the wind to blow the boat without caring where it goes. In either case, water played an important role throughout the ritual—it was viewed as an instrument to clean and purify the environment from demonic or disastrous elements; it was also a site for local communities to manage their daily life and social relations—particularly when there were epidemics or fears for calamities.
