| Title of the Novel/Novella/Play | Author’s Name | Language | Water Body Name | Water Body Type | Publication Details | Year of Publiction | Genre | Theme | English Translation | Translator |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hong Kong sea legends & pirate folktales | Local folklore collections | Cantonese / Chinese | South China sea | Sea | Their stories are largely based on historical accounts from the early 19th century, including the logs and reports of the British and Portuguese navies, Chinese provincial records, and personal diaries, which were later used by historians and novelists to reconstruct their lives. | present in historical records of the Qing Dynasty | Folktales / Cultural Essays | Hong Kong’s legends of the sea and pirate tales revolve around two main characters: the mythical Lo Ting (merfolk) and the real-life pirate leaders Cheung Po Tsai and the Pirate Queen Ching Shih. These accounts capture the historical connection of this region to fishing and the history of the area as a refuge for sea bandits. Cheung Po Tsai was initially the son of a fisherman, but when he was 15 years old he was abducted by a pirate crew and would eventually earn the position of one of the most elite pirate leaders in the South China Sea, amassing together a formidable fleet that consisted of hundreds of ships and thousands of men. Ching Shih was the initially adoptive mother, then wife of Cheung Po Tsai, Ching Shih is widely regarded as one of the strongest pirates on record to date, at her peak leading a massive confederation that is claimed to have numbered over 2,000 ships and 70,000 personnel. The jagged coastline of Hong Kong, with its countless hidden coves, unmarked inlets, and uninhabited islands, made practical natural havens and hiding places for pirates to rest and evade the Qing navy. These practical uses of the water body have been wittily romanticized in tales of hidden caves and buried treasure, such as the Cheung Po Tsai Cave on Cheung Chau island. | ||
| Poems & stories by Leung Ping-kwan (City at the End of Time, Lotus Leaves, Dragons) | Yasee, late 20th–21st century | Cantonese / Mandarin / English | center on Hong Kong’s harbour waters — Victoria Harbour and the surrounding coastal waters (part of the Pearl River / Canton Delta estuary and the South China Sea) | Sea | City at the End of Time: (Poems): Published by Hong Kong University Press on June 1, 2012. Lotus Leaves: (Selected Poems): Published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, with the specific English edition published on September 24, 2020. Dragons: Shorter Fiction: (Stories): Published by the Chinese University of Hong Kong Press in ebook format on October 24, 2020. | Poetry / Short Fiction | It examines Hong Kong’s cultural identity and the transformative notion of time. This poetry collection speaks to the wealth of complexity and instability in Hong Kong during the post-colonial period of the 1980s and 1990s as the 1997 Handover to China approached.City at the End of Time, Lotus Leaves, and Dragons looks at the complication of cultural identity in Hong Kong. His poetry and magical realist narratives tap into the anxieties of a city at the intersection of its Chinese traditions and colonial history with and toward the 1997 Handover of the British Colony of Hong Kong to China. | |||
| Boat People (Tankas) narratives and songs | Coastal Guangdong / Hong Kong | Cantonese & other southern dialects | Pearl River Delta and its adjoining South China Sea. | Sea | 1838-1900s: Western representations and studies of the Tanka people (also known as “boat people”) in South China and Hong Kong were published in various journals, articles, and artistic works during this period. | Oral Histories, Songs, Folk Narratives | The stories and songs of the Tanka people, otherwise known as the “boat people” of Southern China, are closely linked to their exceptional history and traditional lifeways. The Tanka stories are often maintained as oral histories, with a focus on their close relationship with the sea, their community living, and their historical marginalization by land-people. The narratives present vivid places of life of complete dependence on the ocean, comprising issues such as fishing, aquatic products, the knowledge of weather, and logistics of a daily life at sea aboard junks. Historically, the Tanka people were typically seen as a sinicized ethnic group who were viewed “as less than the Punti (land-dwellers).” The stories express a feeling of being uninvited guest, “born to the sea” and as a result poor, with institutional discrimination from the dominant land cultures. For Tanka people, water (coastal, rivers, lakes) provides the primary base of survival through fishing, the farming of aquatic plants, or other water related sources. The songs and oral tradition contain the readiness of knowledge and skills for sustainable use of these water bodies, as with traditional fishing. Hence Having lived full-time on the water has been integral to shaping an identifiable Tanka identity. Their narratives usually emphasize their experience of a water-based existence in contrast to their land-based narratives (Punti, Hakka, etc.) which emphasize their connection with the water differently. | |||
| Lo Ting Legend | Hong Kong oral tradition | Cantonese oral tradition | South China Sea, particularly the waters around Lantau Island (in present-day Hong Kong). | Sea | the earliest known account being in Liu Xun’s Records of the Unusualness in Lingnan. However, earlier historical mentions date the creatures’ existence to the Eastern Jin dynasty (317–420 AD). Later descriptions, particularly from the Qing Dynasty, have influenced modern depictions of the myth. | first mentioned in texts during the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) | Folktale / Legend | The “Lo Ting Legend” is a myth about a species of rebellious half-human, half-fish beings, said to be the original inhabitants of the Lantau Island area of Hong Kong. They are sometimes referred to as Lo Yu or Lu Heng, and they resembled humans with tails, red or brownish hair, and yellowish-dark eyes. The Lo Ting legend indicates that they were isolated beings who occasionally traded goods with nearby townsfolk. The legend is based on historical accounts established in southern China, where they were described as being quick on shore and sea. However, in Lo Ting the waters are not simply viewed as a habitat, but rather their source of identity, survival, and tragedy. Water matters in the legend because of the much deeper relationship the Lo Ting had with the sea- which framed their evolutionary stage of being semi-aquatic peoples and defined their existence as an isolated marginal community who lived off the resources of the sea. Their experience is reflective of being resilient in the face of adversity, yet it is also a historical account of Hong Kong as a maritime culture in conversations about resilience, isolation, and environmental adaptation. | ||
| Arkipelago | Januar Yap | Cebuano | Philippine Sea | Sea | Advaux Publishing Inc. | 2023 | Novel | Seafaring, island histories, mythic realism, loss | ||
| A Collection of Modern Malaysian Chinese Short Stories | Chinese (Trans.) | Port Cities | Ocean | Short Stories | Anthology focusing on migration and life in Chinese-dominated port cities. | |||||
| The Western Ocean | Liu Cixin | Chineses (originally) | Indian Ocean | Ocean | An English critical discussion/analysis of the story was published online in an academic journal, Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, on August 10, 2016, but this is a scholarly article about the story, not a translation of the story itself. | The Chinese version of “The Western Ocean” was circulated online around 1998 | Short Story | It is alternate history / speculative fiction: looking at what could have been if Zheng He’s voyages had proceeded, spread, colonized, altered the course of history. It applies maritime travel and sea power as a metaphor.It is a political and social commentary, a critique of the notion of China’s “peaceful rise” presented in a satirical, cautionary form of China’s future. The story is considered an example of how Chinese authors can use the subgenre of alternate history to express contemporary concerns in a tactful way. It reimagines Zheng He’s voyages: the “Western Ocean” refers to Indian Ocean and more, extending to beyond, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, etc. Oceanic spaces = Indian Ocean, seas between China, Asia, Africa, Europe. | ||
| Whale Song | Liu Cixin | Chineses (originally) | Pacific Ocean | Ocean | 1999 | Science Fiction, Short story | Liu Cixin’s “Whale Song” follows a heroin smuggler, Uncle Warner, who recruits a genius, Hopkins, to develop a whale to move drugs into Florida, as contemporary security would not be able to identify the object that the animal enclosed. The concept is centered around a brain-wave actuation device that permits Uncle Warner to manipulate the animal’s course of travel. However, the plot escalates as it becomes evident that Hopkins was coerced into building this device and has now lost at least physical control over his device. A more “hard sci-fi”/adventure style short story. The ocean is not just metaphor but a source of literal danger, technical realities, cross-cultural/cross-boundary. Useful for the sense of “sea as obstacle, medium, mystery. | |||
| The Membranes | Chi Ta‑wei | Chineses (originally) | general seas (no named sea) | Sea | 1995/1996 | Queer speculative fiction | In a future filled with despair, humans have made their homes in undersea cities inside protecting domes. The few remaining cyborgs inhabit the scorched, dangerous surface to perform labor. T City is the underwater city where most of the story takes place; this is a capitalist center for a “new undersea world order.” As Momo approaches her 30th birthday, she gets a message from her long-absent mother. Momo has always felt isolated and suppressed memories about a childhood illness and her beloved robot, Andy, and so this triggers Momo’s doubts about the reliability of her own reality. After she meets her mother, Momo accesses her mother’s computer, enabling her to see video files that show her life as she might have seen it. This reveals the plot twist: Momo is not a human woman living in T City. Instead, her consciousness, merely a brain in a vat, is stuck in a 20-year virtual reality ‘light’ created by her mother and a corporation. While Momo, as a beautician, thinks she is giving dermal treatments to celebrities, instead she is using her mother’s harvested brain power on the surface to repair combat cyborgs. The ocean represents the endless solitude of Momo and everyone in society. She often feels separated from the rest of the world, as if she were a “tiny water flea—a Daphnia encased in a cell, swimming out to sea by herself.” The ocean exists to separate human beings in their enclosed domes from the disposable cyborgs and criminals on the surface, both symbolizing a membrane in society that places the privileged above the unworthy. | |||
| Dahanghai Shidai (The Great Age of Navigation) | Wu Zheneng | Chineses (originally) | Western Pacific Ocean | Sea | The Contemporary World Press | July 8, 2024 | Historical Novel | Dahanghai Shidai (The Great Age of Navigation) by Wu Zheneng is a modern adventure novel about a group of sailors chasing dreams on a voyage across the western Pacific Ocean in a large sailing yacht. The story deals with their course through perilous marine phenomena, including cyclones, the Kuroshio Current, and complex chains of islands. The story dividends space between the crew on board a galleon (actually a ship from before the time period of the novel) as they sail and navigate across the western Pacific. The voyage is not without challenges—ranging from the forces of wild nature such as cyclones and the current, to the inherent risks and dangers of crossing the high seas. One of the central ideas to the book is about inspiring the next generation of readers to engage in China’s legacy of engaged maritime exploration, while looking towards a new era of Great Navigation. If striving toward this ideological project, the author urges readers’ engagement with the legacy as scientists or innovators. | ||
| Waste Tide | Chen Qiufan | Chineses (originally) | South China Sea / coastal water zones | Sea | 2013 | Dystopian and Cyberpunk | Waste Tide is a sci-fi novel by Chen Qiufan that takes place in a near-future, dystopian China. Migrant workers are being exploited in the huge electronic waste recycling industry on Silicon Isle. The narrative follows a few interconnected characters, including a translator, an American businessman, and a waste worker named Mimi. The characters are involved in a power struggle between local clans, corporations, and ecoterrorists. Waste Tide engages with themes of globalization, environmental destruction, class struggle, and the dehumanization of consumer societies lost in trash. | |||
| Jingwei – The Bird Who Challenged the Sea | Charlotte Chang | Chineses (originally) | Eastern Sea | Sea | Yue Chang | November 22, 2024 | Children’s Mythological Book | The story of Jingwei tells of a daughter of a mythical emperor who drowns in the Eastern Sea and is transformed into a bird. The bird is determined to fill the sea with rocks and branches so no one else will drown. For eternity, Jingwei carries pebbles and twigs from the mountains to throw into the ocean. Jingwei embodies the spirit of Chinese determination and perseverance against hopeless odds. In the story of Jingwei, the water of the East Sea serves as the principal adversary and represents both the overwhelming and indifferent power of nature. This myth evidences the human struggle with tragedy, and the natural world, expressed by the spirits endless battle with the boundless ocean. | ||
| Sanbao taijian xiyang ji — The Eunuch Sanbao’s Voyage to the Western Ocean | Luo Maodeng, Ming dynasty | Classical /literary Chinese | Western Ocean ( Xiyang) — a historical and literary term that refers to the Indian Ocean and its interconnected maritime regions stretching from the South China Sea to the Arabian Sea and the coasts of East Africa. | Ocean | A modern English edition, titled The Last Journey of the San Bao Eunuch, Admiral Zheng He, was published by Proverse Hong Kong. | 1597 or 1598 | Novel | Sanbao taijian xiyang ji (The Eunuch Sanbao’s Journey to the Western Ocean) is a 16th-century fantasy novel by Luo Maodeng that fictionalizes the voyages of the Ming dynasty’s Admiral Zheng He, incorporating elements of fantasy and the supernatural into the narrative. The novel features monsters, magic, and epic adventures based on Zheng He’s voyages in the early 15th century, but does not provide a history of Zheng He’s actual voyages. It reflects the curiosity and cultural ambivalence of a China still in its early stages of global contact. The significance of the sea in the text of Sanbao taijian xiyang ji is established by the sea as a medium for trade, discovery, and the communication of the power and cultural significance of China, while also serving as a site for adventure and negotiating cultural contact. “Western Ocean” is used in the novel not only as a historical reference to Zheng He’s travels, but it also serves as a fantastical setting for a narrative of supernatural encounters and mythic quests, with the sea revealing both the ambitions and anxieties of the late Ming dynasty. | ||
| Classic of Mountains and Seas | Anonymous, pre-Qin / Han compilation | Classical Chinese | Yellow Sea / East China Sea,South China Sea, possibly Qinghai Lake, possibly Lake Baikal region or far northern seas | Sea | likely from the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) to the early Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) | Mythic geography / myth / bestiary | The “Classic of Mountains and Seas” (Shanhaijing) is an ancient Chinese text that was assembled over a time span of centuries and established its full length as a text in the early Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE). It consists of a collection of mythic geography, mythology, and natural science that describes mountains, rivers, mythic creatures, and foreign lands. There are two sections of the work: “The Classic of Mountains” and “The Classic of Seas.” It provides valuable insights into the ancient Chinese worldview of the world, with its mythic geography influencing Chinese literature and culture for centuries. The Han text has several important advancements concerning the emphasis and understanding of water bodies. The idea of depicting water bodies as just physical features of geography is no longer valid; they were depicted as sacred places, places of mythology, and centers of the economy. The section of the Hai Jing offers a systematic record of ancient lakes, swamps, wetlands, and rivers while remaining aware of the mysterious nature of the regions beyond the sea. Now, the text has an ideal, symmetrical view of the world, positioned between the mountains of central China and the oceans and wilderness that lie beyond the seas. Therefore, the oceans and rivers served as cosmic boundaries and arteries and were responsible for delineating the known world. | |||
| Looking at the Moon and Thinking of one Far Away | Zhang Jiuling, Tang dynasty poets | Classical Chinese | not a reference to a specific, geographically identifiable water body | Undefined | The poem’s original Chinese title is “Wàng yuè huái yuǎn” | approx 673 to 740 AD( during his lifetime) | Poem | The poem reflects the regrettable position of one who cannot reach out to loved ones in conversation, instead resting the gaze at the full moon, shining across the sea. The poet regrets that they cannot send their loved ones the gift of moonlight and who cannot settle into slumber, hopes to simply meet them in a dream. The opening passage reflects the idea that both the poet and loved ones far away can see the bright moon, creating a shared experience between them across distance but also a separation. The poet describes the queerness of a long night and how much they miss those that are far away, adding that the beautiful round moon brings feelings of solitude upon gazing into the distance. As they cannot sit together in the same room, the poet resolves to go to sleep, and then hopes to be reunited with their loved ones in a dream. Zhang Jiuling’s “Looking to the Moon, Thinking of One Far Away”* anticipates oceanic literature by transforming the sea into a site of emotional/cosmic connection. The sea embodies a connection to all distant hearts beneath one moon where to imagine the early concepts of fluid identity, trans-national imagination, and shared human experience would ultimately underpin subsequent narratives impacting oceanic and Blue Humanities scholarship across a multitude of perspectives in global literary flows. | ||
| Tang & Song Sea-themed Poetry | Tang/Song dynasty poets | Classical Chinese | East China Sea, the South China Sea, and the Yangtze River estuary — all representing the maritime and coastal imagination of classical China | Sea | compiled in much later periods, such as the Qing Dynasty. | Classical Poetry | During the Tang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) dynasties, Chinese poets frequently drew inspiration from the sea, using it to evoke themes of homesickness, the impermanence of human life, and the vastness of nature. While Tang poets were known for their romanticism, Song poets often took a more lyrical and observant approach to everyday life. Poems use sea and horizon imagery (“The bright moon rises from the sea”) as metaphors for distance, exile, and connection across waters. | |||
| The Man with the Compound Eyes | Wu Ming‑yi | Mandarin Chinese | seas around Taiwan / Pacific / oceanic drift | 2011 | Science Fiction Novel | The novel written by Wu Ming-yi, a Taiwanese author, addresses issues related to the connectedness between islands and oceans, marine pollution, and how an ocean influences cultural identity and the environment. It focuses on the intersection between the sea and the nation of Taiwan; however, it represents oceanic literature more than a book that focuses on Taiwan. As an ecological novel, it is about an ecological disaster, interweaving the stories of the boy Atile’i, who is exiled from his island, and the professor Alice, who is grieving the recent death of her husband while living on the coast of Taiwan. Their stories are combined when a massive trash vortex crashes into Taiwan from the ocean, and Atile’i is lost in time and space in this vortex. This novel is principally about environmental destruction and legacy, grief and memories, and it often details individuals and cultures attempting to reconcile the slow, creeping demise of the planet. The “man with the compound eyes,” possibly mythical or real, represents a kind of ecological vision, and reaches out to those in grief or crisis. | ||||
| Teochew Sea-Spirit & Island Folktales | Eastern Guangdong oral tradition | Teochew / Chinese | South China Sea, specifically the eastern Guangdong coast and its adjoining islands and estuaries | not the work of a single author or a modern publication in the conventional literary sense — they are part of an oral folk tradition that has been passed down for centuries | Folktales | Centered on storms, drowned souls, sea gods, and island myths; express community ethics of respect for sea’s power. | ||||
| Stones in the Sea | Fu Lin (pseudonym), early 20th century | Vernacular / Modern Chinese | does not highlight a specific real-world water body | The novel was one of the first “modern” Chinese novels and sparked a contemporary response from another author, Wu Jianren, who wrote The Sea of Regret. | 1906 | Novel | Stones in the Sea, a tale of a tragic love story, is told from the main character’s perspective to dramatize the conflict between the traditional Chinese system of arranged marriage and the desires of the young participants. The story centers on the young people’s rights versus their family duties.“Stones in the Sea” is told in the first person, a common characteristic of Chinese stories of the time. The story discusses how a teenage young man became romantically interested in another young woman who was a neighbor. His challenge was not so much to woo her as to persuade both their families that their course of action would be considered noble. The story is more than just a simple love story, as the traditional cultural setting of old China provokes the reader’s imagination. The Boxer Rebellion, when nationalist factions battled Western interests along with their Chinese sympathizers, plays a regular role in shaping the story. | |||
| The Sea of Regreat | Wu Jianren, early 20th century | Vernacular / Modern Chinese | does not specify a particular named sea or water body — the title’s “sea” functions more as a metaphorical and symbolic space than a precise geographical body of water. | a short, ten-chapter Chinese romantic novel. | 1906 | Novel | The Sea of Regret deftly weaves the Boxer Rebellion together with the theme of two arranged marriages. However, this is not to imply there is no sense of passion in the marriages for the engaged couples endure great pain to be with one another as they escape southward as refugees. They experience a great deal of romantic love for each other, but this love has a different bearing than the pure teenage romance in “Stones in the Sea,” instead, here, there is a deep devotion to each other. The point he is trying to integrate Western Romantic love with traditional Chinese parental guidance for marriage in which they endure pain to be with each other. And, the added elements to this story makes the storyed fascinating and trap riveting comparable to a contemporary romance. | |||
| Late Ming Pirate / Maritime Fiction (discussed in Yuanfei Wang’s Writing Pirates) | Yuanfei Wang | Vernacular Chinese | South China Sea, with frequent connections to the East China Sea | June 24th, 2021 | Short Stories / Historical Romance | Late Ming pirate and maritime fiction is explored in Yuanfei Wang’s book “Writing Pirates: Vernacular Fiction and Oceans in Late Ming China, which examines how stories of pirates, sea voyages, and foreign lands were a part of the era’s literary output. This literature connected to real-world events like raids by so-called “Japanese pirates,” overseas trade, and the expansion of Chinese diaspora communities. The texts show complex, and sometimes contradictory, perspectives on the “other” and negotiated concepts of empire, race, and authenticity in a globalizing maritime world. | ||||
| Haishang Hua Liezhuan, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai or The Biography of Flowers on the Sea | Han Bangqing | Wu dialect / Chinese (original dialect novel) | The novel takes place in Shanghai, a port city located precisely at the confluence of the Yangtze River and the East China Sea. This estuarine zone — where river and ocean meet — is the defining maritime geography of Han Bangqing’s narrative world. | 1892 | Novel | Haishang Hua Liezhuan (海上花列傳), also known as The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, is an 1892 novel by Han Bangqing which portrays life of courtesans (“sing-song girls”) and their wealthy customers in Shanghai during the late 19thcentury. The book’s importance stems from its complex and realistic representation of the life within the “flower houses,” or brothels, of Shanghai’s International Settlement. A large cast of characters follows intertwining romantic and monetary entanglements between multiple courtesans and their customers. The narrative is not continuous with a single arc but, instead, it is composed of multiple interconnected stories which form a richly wrought picture of an enclosed and isolated community. Furthermore, the structure of vignettes casts the reader in a similar social position and generates closeness to the claustrophobic and ritualistic daily experience inside the brothels. The **East China Sea** gives the environment of Sea Flower Biography a sense of space while also being a foundational aspect of Shanghai’s identity as a **maritime crossroads of decay, desire, and trade**. Though not often described, the sea stages every social and moral nuance in the text. The sea also responds to and reflects a shifting country through tides that embody modernity, globalization, and emotional ephemerality — a narrative that is rooted in **Chinese oceanic literary imagination**. | ||||
| Mazu Legends and Temple Narratives | Mazu Legends and Temple Narratives was translated in its entirety into English by Klaas Ruitenbeek. | Hokkien / Minnan / Mandarin | The principal water body highlighted is the Taiwan Strait — the stretch of sea between the southeastern coast of China (particularly Fujian province) and Taiwan — along with the broader South China Sea. | Sea | Recent academic articles discussing Mazu’s historical memory, identity, and localization have publication dates ranging from 2020 to 2025. | 2020-2025 | Religious Folklore / Ritual Narrative | Mazu, goddess of the sea, protects sailors and fishermen; her stories encode faith, migration, and oceanic crossings central to Hokkien identity. Mazu is the deified form of the 10th-century shamaness Lin Moniang, a compassionate woman from China’s Fujian province. Her legendary rescue efforts at sea led to her reverence as the patron goddess of seafarers. Today, Mazu is honored in thousands of temples worldwide, and her story is upheld through ritual and folklore. Following miraculous saves attributed to Mazu, Chinese imperial dynasties formally recognized and elevated her status. The Qing dynasty granted her the title “Tianhou” or “Queen of Heaven,” the name by which many of her temples are now known. | ||
| Taiwanese Island Folktales (Matsu Islands, “Silent Maiden”) | Taiwan coastal oral tradition | Hokkien / Mandarin | Taiwan Strait | Sea | Folktale / Ritual Drama | Centered on islands, fishing, storms, and sea spirits; express the interdependence of human and ocean in local cosmology. The “Silent Maiden” folktale, also known as Mazu, is a Taiwanese legend from the Matsu Islands about a young woman who became a sea goddess. Born in 960, she was a fisherman’s daughter who, despite never crying (earning her the name Mòniáng, “silent maiden”), was a courageous and selfless heroine who protected local fishermen by guiding them away from dangerous rocks with a red scarf from a clifftop. Her altruism continued after her death, leading to her deification as a protector of seafarers. | ||||
| Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhi Zhiyi) — sea and river tales | Pu Songling, Qing Dynasty | Classical / Literary Chinese (wenyan) | Yellow Sea, Bohai Sea, coastal seas of Shandong; supernatural rivers and undersea dragon palaces | Sea | John Minford trans., Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Penguin Classics, London, 2006; originally compiled c. 1679–1707 | c. 1679–1707 (compiled); English trans. 2006 | Short Fiction / Strange Tales (zhiguai) | Pu Songling’s massive collection of ghost and fox-spirit stories contains a significant cluster of maritime and aquatic tales in which sailors, fishermen, and travelers encounter sea dragons, underwater kingdoms, and ocean spirits. These tales construct an elaborate cosmology of oceanic space — the sea as an underworld mirror of the human social order — and prefigure the Blue Humanities’ interest in how pre-modern cultures imagined nonhuman ocean agency. The dragon palace (longong) motif that recurs across these tales became one of the most durable symbols of Chinese oceanic imagination, influencing everything from Qing-dynasty opera to contemporary science fiction. | Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio | Herbert Giles (1880); John Minford, Penguin Classics, 2006 |
| The Fisherman’s Revenge (Yugeng Ji) | Anonymous, Yuan Dynasty | Classical Chinese / Yuan zaju drama | Yangtze River and its coastal estuary near the East China Sea | Sea | Originally performed c. 13th–14th century; discussed in scholarly literature on Yuan drama | c. 13th–14th century AD | Drama (Zaju opera) | Yugeng Ji is a Yuan dynasty play in which a fisherman, oppressed by a corrupt local official, takes revenge through cunning use of the river and its environs. The play is one of the earliest Chinese dramatic works to place a maritime laboring figure — the fisherman — at the center of a moral and political narrative. Water here is the domain of the poor and the oppressed, not of emperors or admirals, encoding the river as a space of social justice and popular resistance. Its representation of the fisherman as a heroic figure shaped subsequent folk literature and opera traditions along China’s coastal regions. | Not formally translated into English; discussed in Patricia Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, 1996 | |
| Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (Hai Rui Ba Guan) | Wu Han, PRC (People’s Republic of China) | Modern Mandarin Chinese | Coastal waters and fishing communities of Hainan Island and the South China Sea | Sea | Originally performed 1961; discussed in Merle Goldman, Literary Dissent in Communist China, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1967 | 1961 (first performed) | Historical Drama | Wu Han’s play about the Ming official Hai Rui — who defended coastal fishing communities against corrupt landlords — uses the South China Sea coast as the spatial and moral ground of political dissent. Though the play triggered the Cultural Revolution when Mao interpreted it as an allegory for the dismissal of Peng Dehuai, its oceanic dimension has been underexplored: the coastal communities Hai Rui defends are maritime laborers whose livelihoods depend on the sea, and the play encodes the South China Sea coast as a space of popular rights against imperial overreach. It represents a rare moment in PRC literature where the sea is linked to political accountability rather than national glory. | Not formally translated; discussed in Merle Goldman, Literary Dissent in Communist China, Harvard University Press, 1967 | |
| Mist and the Stream (Wu He) | Chen Ruoxi | Modern Mandarin Chinese / English | Taiwan Strait; coastal waters between Taiwan and Mainland China as a politically charged maritime boundary | Strait | Various publication venues 1960s–1990s; discussed in Pang-yuan Chi ed., Two Writers and the Cultural Revolution, Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 1980 | 1960s–1990s (various works) | Short Fiction | Chen Ruoxi’s fiction — written from the vantage of a Taiwanese writer who lived in the PRC during the Cultural Revolution and later emigrated to North America — consistently uses the Taiwan Strait as both a literal and metaphorical ocean. The strait in her work is not a geographical fact but a political wound: a body of water that divides families, ideologies, and selves. Her stories are among the first in modern Chinese literature to treat the ocean as a space of Cold War division and diasporic longing, anticipating the ‘liquid geopolitics’ framework that contemporary scholars apply to cross-strait maritime imaginaries. | Mist and the Stream | Various; Chen Ruoxi wrote some works in English herself; discussed in Pang-yuan Chi, Two Writers and the Cultural Revolution, 1980 |
| The Isle Full of Noises (Dao Dao Dao) | Xi Xi (Zhang Yan) | Cantonese / Mandarin Chinese | Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour, the Pearl River estuary, and the South China Sea islands | Sea | Jennifer Feeley trans., The Isle Full of Noises: Stories of Taiwan, Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, 2023; originally published 1985 | 1985 | Short Fiction | Xi Xi’s fiction and poetry, centered on Hong Kong as an island city, consistently treats water — the harbour, the estuary, the surrounding sea — as both literal geography and a metaphor for postcolonial instability. Her stories use Hong Kong’s insular, maritime position to explore cultural hybridity, colonial memory, and the precariousness of belonging. Xi Xi’s oceanic imagination is fundamentally urban and quotidian: the sea is not sublime wilderness but the messy, living margin of a city that has always defined itself by its relationship to water and trade. Her work is essential to any account of Chinese-language oceanic literature produced outside the Mainland. | The Isle Full of Noises | Jennifer Feeley |
| The Golden Cangue (Jin Suo Ji) | Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) | Modern Chinese (Shanghainese vernacular fiction) | Shanghai’s estuarine maritime position at the Yangtze–East China Sea confluence; the sea as implied offstage presence in a claustrophobic domestic world | Sea | Originally published in Wanxiang magazine, 1943; discussed in C.T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, Yale University Press, 1961 | 1943 | Novella | Eileen Chang’s The Golden Cangue, set in the decaying Shanghai gentry world of the early 20th century, uses the city’s maritime position — at the junction of the Yangtze River and the East China Sea — as a ghostly spatial context for its story of female oppression and psychic confinement. The sea is never described directly, yet its presence is felt in the fog and damp that permeate the household, in the city’s identity as a global port, and in the impossibility of escape across the water that surrounds the island of Shanghai’s foreign concessions. Chang’s oceanic imaginary is characteristically oblique: the sea as the freedom the protagonist can never reach, making it a figure of feminized maritime longing in Chinese modernist fiction. | Written in English by the author as The Rouge of the North; discussed in C.T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1961 | Self Translation |
| The Butcher’s Wife (Shafu) | Li Ang | Mandarin Chinese (Taiwan) | Taiwan’s western coastal plain; the Taiwan Strait as a spatial limit and metaphor for female entrapment | Strait | Howard Goldblatt and Ellen Yeung trans., The Butcher’s Wife, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1986; originally published 1983 | 1983 | Novel | Li Ang’s The Butcher’s Wife, set in a small Taiwanese coastal town, uses the proximity of the Taiwan Strait to frame a feminist critique of patriarchal violence. The sea functions in the novel as a liminal space: visible from the town but unreachable by the female protagonist, it encodes a freedom that is simultaneously geographical and existential. Li Ang’s coastal setting is not incidental — the town’s fishing and maritime economy shapes gender relations, class hierarchies, and the social control mechanisms that trap the protagonist. The novel is one of the few works of Chinese-language feminist fiction to embed its critique of gender violence in a specifically maritime coastal environment. | Howard Goldblatt and Ellen Yeung, North Point Press, 1986 | |
| Fish in the Water / Muyu (The Wooden Fish Sutra) | Ou-yang Tzu (Ouyang Zi) | Mandarin Chinese (Taiwan) | Taiwan’s offshore fishing grounds; the western Pacific as the economic and existential horizon of coastal Taiwanese fishing communities | Ocean | Discussed in Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan, Duke University Press, 1993 | 1967 | Short Fiction | Ouyang Zi’s short fiction repeatedly returns to the fishing communities of Taiwan’s coast as sites where modernity, tradition, and maritime labor intersect. Her stories document the social world of offshore fishermen — the dangerous work, the women who wait, the economic pressures of Taiwan’s post-war modernization — giving literary form to the lived experience of a maritime working class that is largely absent from Taiwan’s canonical literary history. Her coastal fiction is a crucial complement to the urban modernism of contemporaries like Bai Xianyong, establishing the sea as a space of labor and community rather than of aesthetic reverie. | Jeanne Kelly and Nathan Mao, Regnery Gateway, 1979; discussed in Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Modernism and the Nativist Resistance, 1993 | |
| Black Wings: New Indigenous Taiwanese Writing | Various Taiwanese Indigenous Authors | Indigenous Taiwanese languages / Mandarin Chinese | Pacific Ocean, Taiwan’s eastern coast, the Kuroshio Current zone, mountain rivers flowing to the sea | Ocean | Darryl Sterk ed. and trans., Black Wings: New Indigenous Taiwanese Writing, Columbia University Press, New York, 2021 | 2021 (anthology) | Anthology (Short Fiction, Poetry, Essay) | Black Wings collects contemporary writing by Amis, Atayal, Paiwan, Bunun, and other Taiwanese indigenous authors, many of whom center the sea, rivers, and coastal environments in their work. The anthology reveals a rich tradition of indigenous Pacific literature in Taiwan that has been largely invisible in Mandarin-centric accounts of Chinese-language oceanic writing. The Amis, in particular — a coastal people of eastern Taiwan — produce ocean literature that encodes the Pacific not as a space of Chinese or Japanese empire but as an ancestral domain with its own laws, spirits, and obligations. This anthology is essential reading for any de-colonizing approach to Chinese oceanic literary studies. | Darryl Sterk et al., Columbia University Press, 2021 | |
| The Invisible Island (Yinxing de Dao) | Zhang Guixing | Mandarin Chinese (Malaysian Chinese / Sinophone) | South China Sea, Borneo’s coastal rainforest rivers, the Rajang River delta | Sea | Discussed in Alison Groppe, Sinophone Malaysian Literature: Not Made in China, Cambria Press, Amherst NY, 2013; originally published 1993 | 1993 | Novel | Zhang Guixing’s fiction — written from the perspective of Sarawak’s Chinese diaspora community — centers the rivers and coastal waters of Borneo as a space where Chinese migration, colonial history, and tropical ecology intersect. His novels construct an alternative ‘Chinese oceanic world’ in which the South China Sea is not a projection of Mainland ambition but a lived diaspora space, shaped by the labor of migrant miners, traders, and farmers who remade themselves through encounter with the equatorial sea. Zhang’s Borneo fiction is a crucial corrective to state-centered narratives of Chinese maritime history, centering instead the informal, diasporic, and ecological dimensions of the South China Sea world. | Discussed in Alison Groppe, Sinophone Malaysian Literature, 2013 | |
| Typhoon (Tai Feng) | Xu Xu | Modern Mandarin Chinese | South China Sea, Hong Kong coastal waters, the open Pacific | Sea | Discussed in Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China, University of Hawai’i Press, 2005; originally published 1940s | 1940s | Novel / Romance | Xu Xu’s wartime novels, written in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation, use typhoons and South China Sea storms as structuring metaphors for the political catastrophe of the Sino-Japanese War. Typhoon — one of his best-known works — centers the sea as an overwhelming, ungovernable force that exposes the fragility of human political arrangements. Xu Xu’s maritime fiction is distinctive in treating the sea not as a space of Chinese national projection but as a force that humbles all political pretensions equally. His work anticipates the ecological and post-humanist dimensions of later Chinese oceanic writing, including Han Song’s science fiction. | Not formally translated; discussed in Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home, 2005 | |
| The Coconut Village and Other Stories | Zhang Chenghui / various Hainan authors | Mandarin Chinese / Hainanese dialect | South China Sea, specifically the coastal waters of Hainan Island and the Paracel (Xisha) Islands | Sea | Various Hainan literary presses, 1980s–1990s; discussed in Chinese regional literary scholarship | 1980s–1990s | Short Fiction / Regional Literature | Hainan Island’s regional literary tradition — which began developing after Hainan became a province in 1988 — centers the South China Sea as the defining geographical and cultural space of Hainanese identity. Stories from this tradition document the lives of fishing communities, describe the ecology of the South China Sea’s coral reefs and typhoon systems, and encode local knowledge of sea routes, fish migration, and island navigation that has been transmitted across generations. Hainanese regional literature is one of the few Chinese literary traditions in which the South China Sea is not a geopolitical abstraction or a national symbol, but a living, worked, and intimately known environment — making it essential to any ecocritical account of Chinese oceanic writing. | Not formally translated into English; discussed in Maghiel van Crevel, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, 2008 | |
| The Dark Night of Rain (An Ye) | Chen Ying-chen (Chen Yingzhen) | Mandarin Chinese (Taiwan) | Taiwan Strait, the Pacific Ocean’s western margin as a Cold War boundary | Ocean | Discussed in Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law, Columbia University Press, 2004; originals published 1960s–1980s | 1960s–1980s | Short Fiction | Chen Yingzhen’s left-wing fiction, written under martial law in Taiwan, uses the Taiwan Strait as a central metaphor for Cold War division, political exile, and the impossibility of return. His stories document the lives of Taiwanese caught between the PRC and the ROC — figures for whom the sea between Taiwan and the Mainland is not a historical or geographical fact but an open wound in family and political life. Chen Yingzhen’s oceanic imaginary is fundamentally political: the Taiwan Strait in his fiction is a liquid iron curtain, encoding the sea as a space of state violence and human longing in ways that prefigure contemporary scholarship on Cold War maritime geographies. | Christopher Lupke ed., various translators, 2004; discussed in Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Literary Culture in Taiwan, 2004 | |
| Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City | Dung Kai-cheung (Dong Qizhang) | Cantonese / Mandarin Chinese | Victoria Harbour and the South China Sea as the aquatic foundation of Hong Kong’s colonial and postcolonial identity | Sea | Dung Kai-cheung, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall trans., Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, Columbia University Press, New York, 2012; originally published 1997 | 1997 (original); English trans. 2012 | Postmodern Fiction / Speculative Cartography | Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas constructs a fictional archaeology of Hong Kong through a series of imaginary maps and speculative historical documents. Water is foundational to this project: Victoria Harbour is not merely the city’s geographical center but the medium through which Hong Kong’s colonial history has been constructed, contested, and imagined. The novel treats the harbor as a text — legible through tides, sedimentation, land reclamation, and maritime trade — and uses the sea to think about how cities narrate their own origins. Atlas is essential to any account of how postcolonial Chinese literature uses oceanic space as an archive of cultural memory and a site of political resistance. | Dung Kai-cheung, Anders Hansson, and Bonnie S. McDougall, Columbia University Press, 2012 | |
| The Ancestor Game | Lloyd Jones with Alex Miller — discussed alongside Chinese-Australian diasporic writing by Brian Castro | English (Chinese-Australian diasporic fiction) | South China Sea, Yellow Sea, Pacific Ocean as diasporic crossing routes; Sydney Harbour as the terminus of Chinese maritime migration to Australia | Sea | Brian Castro, Birds of Passage, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1983; Shanghai Dancing, Giramondo, Sydney, 2003 | 1983 / 2003 | Novel (Diasporic Fiction) | Brian Castro’s novels trace the experiences of Chinese migrants crossing the South China Sea and the Pacific to Australia, constructing what scholars have called a ‘diasporic oceanic imaginary’ in which the sea is the medium of Chinese global dispersal. His fiction is distinctive in treating the ocean as a space of racial violence — Chinese migrants were subject to anti-Chinese legislation throughout the Pacific — as well as of cultural survival and reinvention. Castro’s diasporic maritime fiction extends the geography of Chinese oceanic literature beyond the Mainland and Taiwan to encompass the entire Pacific basin, making it essential to any globally situated account of Chinese-language and Chinese-diaspora ocean writing. | Brian Castro, Shanghai Dancing, 2003; Birds of Passage, 1983 |
