On Sept. 2, an age-old 7-masted fishing boat in Yugang Village of Guangfu Town completed its 3-month overhaul and set sail again on the Taihu Lake.
The newly refurbished boat measures 25 meters by 5 meters and has a loading capacity of more than 30 metric tons. It is a giant of a wooden boat although it doesn’t stack up against an iron ship. The main structure of the vessel is more than 100 years old and the last time it was overhauled was in 2007.
There were once 108 such fishing boats in Yugang Village alone, but in the 1990s, only three of them were left, which have been protected as cultural relics. And the 7-masted ancient boat making technique was inscribed in the 4th batch of provincial-level intangible cultural heritages of Jiangsu in 2016 and in the first batch of endangered items on the representative list of municipal-level intangible cultural heritages of Suzhou in 2017.
