2 - The Colour-Boat Ritual: A Sailors' Religious Tradition

From the Song-era golden age of Chinese maritime commerce and until the nineteenth-century disappearance of the junk trade in the South China Sea, seafaring crews used to perform the ritual of ‘launching a colour-boat’ (song caichuan 送彩船). The ritual involved the building and setting afloat of a model ship that carried the likeness or names of the actual crew who attended the occasion or, otherwise, those of their deceased companions whose souls were sent off by burning the vessel. Documents from the Ming and Qing periods show that the ceremony was due in specific locations outside of China and that its performance in the proper localities was an intrinsic part of maritime knowledge. Other Qing-era descriptions of the ceremony allow us to examine the specifics of the ceremony; these point to its direct influence upon similar boat-burning rituals in present Taiwan and Fujian, most notably a ceremony in honor of the deities known as Wangye 王爺. This paper explores the Colour-boat Ritual as a fundamental pillar of maritime practice, entangling the navigational, technological, and religious knowledge that undermined the overseas commercial networks of East Asia. Also, it stresses the massive influence of seafaring religious practice outside of the Chinese maritime cultural landscape, as the Colour-boat Ritual was adapted into a plague-expulsion rite after its original crowd of sailor-practitioners diminished.