Brilliant Corners: China

China | The Wave
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Brilliant Corners China: exploring Hainan’s surf culture
by Sam Bleakley

I’ve just returned from Hainan Island, China filming the fifth episode of a presenter led surf travel series called Brilliant Corners that uses surfing to get under the skin of coastlines and cultures. The series will include five 52 minute episodes on China, Liberia, Barbados, Jamaica and Haiti, distributed by XTreme Video. Through interviews, creative narrative and surfing sequences, these films capture not only the changing relationship between cultures and coastlines, but how surfing can help to re-represent usually miss-represented places, and how local (often nascent) surf cultures can inspire positive change, engaging sustainably with the environment.

When you think of China, surfing rarely enters the equation. But an interview with Nik Zanella, expat Italian living in Hainan, reveals Mandarin manuscripts and poetry describing fishermen riding river-bore waves on wooden boards in China way back in the Ninth century. Further, a mysterious collection of ‘surfing Buddhas’ decorate the walls of an inland Buddhist temple built in the 1880s. After the temple was destroyed in a fire, a local artist carved statues of seventy men of all ages riding a green overhead wave. ‘Surfing’ in Chinese - chong lang - literally means ‘entering the waves’. Not taking them over, or dominating them (‘rip’, ‘tear’ and ‘shred’ mentality), but entering into their collective spirit (surfing as the wave guides). The Taoist tradition that has permeated Chinese culture – simply referred to as ‘The Way’ – basically teaches to go with the flow, to watch for nature’s pulses and currents and to follow them. This is what a handful of surfers have been doing from Hong Kong to Shenzen and Hainan Island over the last decade, trying to develop a Tao of surfing – follow the pulse and improvise with its patterns and paradoxes. Easier said than done, because you need a really good eye and a feel for the wave to enter the Tao of surfing. But by carefully following the pulse, you will almost certainly, say the Sages, discover the unexpected.

Ninth-century Chinese alchemists are said to have discovered gunpowder while searching for the elixir of life, and this led to the invention of fireworks, a spectacular celebration of life. The elixir is, in fact, not eternal life, but celebration that there is life at all. Right now in Hainan, China, it feels like surfing has begun its life in the country that is on the verge of becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and is ready to explode over the next decade, but its trajectory is uncertain. What is certain is that the provincial government of Hainan is investing wholeheartedly in surfing to establish a new trajectory. And the bore-wave known as the ‘Silver Dragon’ breaking down the Qiantang River once a month now hosts an annual competition. The gunpowder trail has been ignited, and the dragon is stirring. The quest to reclaim China’s surfing heritage is just beginning.
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The eccentric Australian Peter Drouyn explored the south-east coast of China in the early 1970s. Despite his fabulous tales of great surf, Drouyn took no photographer, and so had no evidence, and was soon eclipsed by magazine editor and filmmaker Alby Falzon’s ‘discovery’ of Indonesia as a surfing destination. Drouyn, an Asian studies graduate, revisited China in 1985, when he found waves on Hainan. Typically flamboyant, he attempted to persuade the Chinese government to hire him as coach of their future national surf team. He was convinced that surfing would be an Olympic sport, and that Chinese surfers could become world champions. But the government refused Drouyn a visa extension, and he returned to Australia empty-handed. 

Five years later an open-minded politician called Zhou Ping became the minister of tourism for Hainan. After Hawaii and Hainan becoming sister states in 1990 Zhou developed a burning passion to bring an international surfing event to China. A local scene took off organically between 2001 and 2006, and by 2009 was firmly rooted, allowing Zhou’s international event to gain a foothold. In 2010 John Callahan’s surfEXPLORE team published articles showcasing Hainan’s high quality surf and China celebrated their first high profile contest at Riyue Wan (Sun Moon Bay). This event has snowballed into the annual Women’s and Men’s World Longboard Championships, recently won by Australians Chelsea Williams and Harley Ingleby respectively, with a fifth place from the UK’s Ben ‘Skindog’ Skinner. The surf on offer was excellent. This is no surprise. In summertime, Riyue Wan sits quietly by a smooth-as-porcelain sea, resisting effort in the wet heat. Then, as summer segues into winter, the northeast monsoon blows, and from November to March the South China Sea comes alive, turning from bright green to steely grey. The fetch is short but the wind is stiff and slicing. The porcelain sea shows its claws, shifting from cat to tiger, delivering with authority. But then, as all surfers know, there is a beautiful and transforming secret at work - the rough surf is combed out along a series of rocky points, reefs and headlands, where rushing sets are brushed offshore by the same winds. Weeks of reeling shoulder high left handers are common.

Making a travel film is a lesson in Tao. It takes an equal mix of organisation and improvisation, of pretty sparklers and the crackle of jumping jacks. I specifically timed the Brilliant Corners film to coincide not with the World Longboard Championship, but the annual Hainan Open, now in its seventh year, and gathering point for the vibrant local surf scene. This was the springboard for interviews with standout longboarders Monica Guo, Darci Lui and Tie ‘TZ’ Zhuang. TZ is from Inner Mongolia and moved to northern China where he worked in desperate conditions on mega-construction sites in the freezing cold, often unpaid. He heard from his brother, who was working down in Hainan, both coastal and subtropical. Lured by the warmth, TZ travelled 36 hours by train from Beijing and found a job at Riyue Wan in 2009, taking Chinese tourists on horse rides. He soon met the local surf crew and quickly became one of the best Chinese longboarders, tapping the Tao.

These characters provide me with a beautiful insight into the magic and mysteries of Chinese culture, history, and the challenges for the future, from coastal development to pollution, to the re-mergence of the ancient Chinese beliefs of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, that are often brought together in a syncretic appreciation of nature, suggesting, perhaps, that if you respect the wave and its life form, you get the best out of the ride. And, if I understand Buddhism correctly, living fully in the present in a sense eradicates time, for there is no mindless wandering to recollection, and no fruitless future guesswork. This state of mind is when you perform at your best, not mindless, but mindful. Staying in the present is one of the most important things when travelling. Paradoxically, planning a trip means thinking ahead the whole time, and a surf trip puts emphasis upon this as you spend a lot of time putting together clues as to where the best breaks may be. But within this general frame of preparedness, the rule is to stick with the now. Jazz music can teach so much about this. The joke runs: ‘what is the time?’ The response: ‘now is the time’! Those who make improvisation in the present look easy are thinking ahead, but confidently drawing this knowledge into the hear-and-now.

Above all I discover that China is a culinary culture. Taste and smell to the Chinese are as looking and touching are to westerners. Here you do not just think the philosophy of Tao, the balance of forces, you taste it in pure, clean, contrasting flavours. The French scholar of Chinese aesthetics, Francois Jullien, puts it simply and elegantly – to understand Chinese interactions, especially the importance of glancing off something rather than going at it directly, the westerner must slow down his or her thought. Jullien argues that westerners want to eat life, consume it, with an imperative to control in the instant, where the Chinese tradition of ‘vital nourishment’ is to tend life over time, rather than consume it now.
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While the Cultural Revolution changed much in China, the principle of vital nourishment remains sacred. This is literally exhibited in the way that a Chinese family will feed you with obvious pleasure, as a freely given gift, not in any way demanding that you have an obligation to return the gift. The family glance off you so that you feel honoured rather than obligated. I now see ‘vital nourishment’ as a core aesthetic practice in China – a means of subtly coming at an issue from several points of view to bring out the barely perceptible, a distinct but underplayed flavour. Contrast this with the urgent need for westerners to get to the point. It strikes me that I have been living this Chinese way all my surfing life, where I have always practised surfing as subtle inflection, indirection, small but telling shifts in weight distribution producing big effects on the wave face. Longboard surfing is all about cat-like agility and lifting off, not bringing down your weight full force or pushing against the unfolding and natural movement of the wave.

The more I think about it, the more I feel that Chinese thought is already embedded somewhere in the soul of the west and that the proclaimed division between Occident and Orient is not so strong. While westerners live with the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler, nobody thinks of the earth circling the sun when we watch a sunrise or sunset. Rather, you are awash with the glory of it all. As you duck-dive a solid white-water wave, self-survival may be at the centre of your immediate cosmos, but how can you not at the same time be in awe of the churning wave and its impactful poetry? Indeed, studies tracking eye movements in ordinary perception or ‘looking’ tell you that most of the time, westerners are ‘glancing’ also, taking things in holistically, looking sideways. ‘Eye contact’ would be very challenging – most of the time that we gaze on another person’s face, we look at the mouth, not the eyes, dampening down the direct for the off-centre, the offbeat.

Nowhere in the world, apart from India, is the past being eclipsed so quickly by the present as in China. But how can a history as rich as China’s simply be erased? It was Marx who insisted that the political present cannot be understood without recourse to history, yet Chairman Mao’s brand of Communism attempted to erase history to enforce his own vision of the present, including wiping out the Buddhist legacy and its Tibetan focus, deliberately destroying China’s antiquity. The prospective has replaced the retrospective. China is turning from history to anticipation, signalling a massive cultural shift. 

Three forces meet in China: an overwhelming urge for modernization – mixed with tradition (or the reinvention of tradition), and the still powerful grip of state socialism. China’s two conflicting traditions, Confucianism and Taoism, remain in dialogue even within state socialism. Confucianism is about the polite and obedient citizen; Taoism is about a return to the rhythms and presences of nature, typified by the wild ‘mountain man’ in solitary retreat and contemplation. For decades, Maoist authorities derided both traditions as feudal superstition, but it seems that Taoism and Confucianism are indelibly imprinted on the population, as complementary expressions of the raw and the cooked, nature and culture. 

Confucius suggested that perfect balance is reflected in calm water, a model for composure. This is the social instinct – polite compromise. At the heart of Taoism is a paradoxical wild calm. Nature is a vortex and you are at its eye, involved but not involved. We are back to the twin essences of surfing, the tube ride and the noseride: both require absolute poise, calm, and a kind of withdrawal at the eye of the vortex.

And here in China, I discover that the art of communication, whether person-to-person, or locals longboarding, is the opposite to in-your-face. It is the indirect glance off something that matters, not the direct hit. We see this as ‘politeness’, but it is manners of another sort. It is a graceful and intricate way of communicating, crab-like, sideways, indirect. Communication in China is without direct eye contact, through glance, allusion, the sideways gesture. The Chinese psyche is not about confrontation, but about hint, glancing off something rather than going to it directly, the sinuous movement. Strangely, the uncertainty of the ocean matches the uncertainty of doing things in China. Rather than Yes/No, everything is a maybe, but somehow reaches a conclusion in a meandering uncertain way - the undulating Tao.
SAM BLEAKLEY is a travel writer, author, presenter and professional surfer, from Gwenver beach, Sennen, Cornwall, UK. Sam's book Surfing Brilliant Corners details a decade of extreme global surf travel, illustrated by renowned photographer John Callahan. The sequel, Surfing Tropical Beats is the first surf travel book translated into Mandarin Chinese . Sam has an MA in Geography from the University of Cambridge, is researching a part-time PhD in Travel Writing with Falmouth University and has been a multiple British and European Longboard Surfing Champion. Sam specialises in surf exploration projects with the surfEXPLORE team.
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