Angling appears in the Mu t’ien tzǔ chuan, a work assigned to the tenth century b.c., but probably of much later date. “The pith of the ti, tied half-way up the fishing-line,” about 500 b.c. took the place of our modern float: the moment the Angler “saw it sink, he knew a fish was on.”[1122]
In the first century before and after the Christian era the germ of Imperial ostentation and extravagance in tackle raged virulently. Spreading, if not from China to Peru, at any rate like silk[1123] from China to Rome, it claimed among its victims the Emperor Nero and the Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty. The bacillus found the better host in Nero, who[1124] fished with golden nets drawn by purple ropes, while his brother of Asia confined himself to angling from a boat with a hook of pure gold, a line of white silk, and red carp for a lure.[1125]
But the commonality of one State, at any rate, ran no bad second to the Imperial pair. “The people of Lu,” we read, “were fond of fishing: they used cinnamon bark for bait, forged gold for hooks, which were variegated with silver or green colours, while their fishing line was ornamented with the feathers of the turquoise kingfisher.”[1126] Here perhaps, as the bird lives on fish, we can detect a conscious or unconscious touch of homœopathic magic.
Lures such as the natural or artificial fly obtain no record: even now the Chinese and Japanese try most things before an artificial fly. The baits consisted of worms, grain, fish, meat, and cassia. The latter aromatic herb recalls the anglers of Oppian and Pliny, who believed in the attraction of fish by the sense of smell.[1127]
In their unusual baits our authors suggest their confrères of Greece and Rome. Thus in size of prey, and similarity of bait, the author of the K’ung ts’ung tzǔ and Herodotus coincide. As the former lived not two centuries later than the Father of History, the tip had possibly just reached China from Egypt—“from Africa comes ever something new”—viz. the chine of a porker for a crocodile.
The story runs that Tzǔ-ssǔ, a grandson of Confucius, witnessed the landing from the Yellow River of a fish “as big as a cart.” The fishermen had baited first with bream, but as the monster, like the law, de minimis non curavit, they substituted half a sucking pig with instantaneous success.
But the bait handed down to us by Chuang Tzǔ (fourth century b.c.), if it faintly recall, completely eclipses “the lungs of a wild bull,” which Ælian recommended for the capture of the Silurus, in that it was no less an one than “fifty whole oxen!”[1128]
As a producer and as a user of Nets, China ranked and ranks perhaps higher than any country. The number and variety of Nets in Julius Pollux can well be matched, while the Oppianic opulence of
“A thousand names a fisher might rehearse Of Nets, intractable in smoother verse,”
meets its peer, if not its superior in Scarth, Gray, or Dabry de Thiersant,[1129] who devotes thirty-five pages to what Plutarch terms these “engines of encirclement.”