The eel trade is now a global industry. Eel populations in places such as coastal Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that once sustained small local communities are now fished for exports to consumers throughout Europe and Asia. This presentation examines the eel trade of a different time and place, exploring the unexpected consequences of transporting live eels in early medieval China. While far more limited in scale and geographic scope than today’s global industry, this study explores a fascinating set of cultural and religious associations with the eel in this period, and reveals a new dimension of popular religious practice, through which a misplaced animal could come to possess the powers of a god.

            In this story, first recorded in the 5th century collection of strange tales, Yiyuan 異苑, a merchant carrying a shipment of live eels leaves one in a pool of rainwater that had accumulated in a hollowed-out tree. Upon discovering the mysterious presence of a live eel in a tree, the people of a nearby village reason that it must have a supernatural cause, and begin to leave offerings to the eel in the tree. Eventually, as the offerings increase, a temple structure is built around the tree, and the eel is honored as a god. Surprisingly, the offerings to the eel prove to be efficacious: Those who honor the eel properly are rewarded with good fortune, while those who don’t meet disaster.

I discuss this story in relation to its historical context, a period in which the waterways of the Yangtze River were at the center of cultural, religious, and economic activity. In this period, Yangtze and the lakes and tributaries to which it is connected created a network of transportation routes that were the backbone of travel for political, military, commercial, and religious reasons. As a source of food, they also provided numerous varieties of fish and other aquatic creatures, not to mention water for irrigation. Although central to daily life, however, these waterways remained wild, dangerous places. On the river, people lived and worked alongside animals both benign and dangerous, and faced the ever-present risk of shipwrecks and drowning. Popular tales told stories of more fantastical river inhabitants, from dragons and deities to the spirits of the drowned, who could both help and harm those they encountered.

This story is not the only eel lore in the early medieval narrative tradition. Elsewhere, eels are both the subject of abject fascination and coveted as a source of food. The eel is joined by other aquatic animals that take on supernatural properties in this storytelling tradition, and in these cases the creatures’ status as both foodstuff and object of veneration play out quite differently. What is unique about this eel story is the way it calls attention to how trade and religious practice extend the network created by waterways beyond their physical limits, bringing the river and all it entails into contact with the ecologies and communities of the land.