Surfing’s origins are under closer scrutiny. Photo: Valentino Funghi/Unsplash
Surfing has been around for a long time. It’s generally thought to have originated in Hawaii or Peru, among other places, but as is often the case with history, finding the bottom of the tap root for a tree that’s grown so large is very nearly impossible. But a new surfing origin story has risen from the pages of an ancient Chinese manuscript, and it looks likely that surfing may not have even originated in the ocean. Instead, surfing may have its roots in riding a river bore in the Hangzhou River.
According to an Italian historian named Nicola Zanella — who, interestingly, had a small role in a feature with The Inertia last year — there may have been a wave-riding culture in China as far back as the Song Dynasty, which lasted from 960 AD to 1279. Zanella found descriptions of surfing, at least in a very basic sense, in classic Chinese literature. He went on to publish a book called Children of the Tide that talks about it at length.
Back in 2006, Zanella was visiting a Buddhist temple in Kunming, the the capital and largest city of China’s Yunnan province. There, he saw a bas-relief sculpture (a form of sculpting where all the elements of the sculpture are attached to a solid background) that showed a group of arhats, which are Buddhists who have achieved Nirvana, doing something that looked suspiciously similar to surfing. One of them in particular appeared to not just be doing something similar, but something exactly like surfing. “The guy was standing up, his pose was exactly what we teach – back foot flat, front foot at a 45-degree angle, looking five meters in front of the board,” he told the South China Morning Post. “And his face – he looked stoked.” The surfer in question was, however, riding a fish — and not in the modern sense. It was literally a fish.
According to the story, Zanella asked someone at the temple about the sculpture. That small question led to a very lengthy investigation; an investigation that spanned thousands of years of Chinese literature. He was told that the people in the sculpture were from Hangzhou, which is the place where Red Bull’s Battle of the Silver Dragon event is held. You know, of course, that the event is on one of the world’s largest tidal bores in the Qiantang River.
As Zanella researched, he found a story called Contemplating the Tide, written by a poet named Zhou Mi. In the story, Zhou talked about a festival where spectators watched as “hundreds of brave watermen … with unfastened hair and tattoos, holding colored flags, race to the water … they paddle towards the oncoming waves … then they leap up and perform a hundred maneuvers without getting the tail of their flags even slightly wet.”
The poet went on to describe the antics of the competitors in greater detail. “They gather in a group of a hundred, holding colored flags, and compete in treading waves,” he wrote. “They head straight to the river mouth to welcome the tide. Moreover, there’s some who tread on drifting wood … performing hundreds of water tricks, having fun, each displaying great mastery.”
Despite the fact that Zanella appears to have discovered that people were indeed surfing a river bore 1,000 years ago, he’s careful to explain that surfing’s tree has grown many roots. “Wave riding does not belong to any nation,” he said. “It has been invented and reinvented in many places and called a lot of different names. It is humanity’s commonwealth, to be enjoyed by everyone.”
