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 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 boat and 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, 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. During the ceremonies, people usually brought the deities or the boats to patrol the streets, catching the demons and the spirits whom they deemed causing illness or misfortune. 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 with several boatmen to monitor where the plague boat was going; in others, people let the wind blow away the boat without checking where it goes.
Regardless of the forms of the rituals, the key elements of “sending a boat”—water, fire, and boat—played an important role throughout the process. Both water and fire were used to clean and purify the environment from demonic or disastrous elements; boat was taken as a vehicle for carrying the deities and sending off the spirits; water was a medium that can take the unclean things far away from the land and the communities. Moreover, the practice of sending a boat constituted a space for local communities to manage their lives and handle unexpected situations. The symbolic use of boat and water also became an important component of Wenzhou’s social life as it served as an instrument between supernatural and mundane worlds.
