Along the Malabar Coast, in India’s southwestern state of Kerala, stands a row of curious contraptions: giant cantilevered fishing nets, each 20 metres tall, constructed with a system of weighted bamboo and teak poles supporting vast nylon nets. Each set of poles is suspended in the air by bowling-ball sized rocks tied into a coil of thick ropes, a balancing weight to dip or lift the massive nets in and out of the water. From a distance, they look like a series of giant butterfly catchers, heaving on the ends of impossibly angled see-saws.
From dawn until dusk, teams of five or six fishermen on each rig tug the weighted ropes up and down, their workers’ chants a hypnotic backbeat to their exertions. Strange that in such an ancient country, these nets are found nowhere else, and stranger still that locals call them cheena vala, Chinese fishing nets.
A system of weighted bamboo and teak poles support fishing nets believed to have been introduced by the Chinese. Photo: Shutterstock
This is Kochi, otherwise known for its European colonial history, where for four and a half centuries, the Portuguese, the Dutch and finally the British took turns controlling this natural harbour, an ideal gateway to access the rest of South Asia.
Having discovered a new sea route around the Cape of Good Hope in present-day South Africa in 1498, Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama completed his route to the East by landing 200km up the Malabar Coast, at Calicut, kicking off centuries of European colonial presence across the Indian Ocean.
Yet before mentioning the many churches or palaces built by European settlers, any tourist pamphlet to Kochi is more likely to feature images of these giant nets. On Kerala’s official tourism website, a dedicated page, along with the nets, lists all the other supposed Chinese contributions to Kerala culture, all with names in the local Malayalam language containing the prefix “China”. There’s the cheena chatti, a cast-iron deep-frying pan found in every Kerala household, similar to the wok, and the cheena pattu, Chinese silk often used to make saris.
Vasco da Gama was a Portuguese explorer and commander of the first ships to sail directly from Europe to India. Photo: Getty Images
The nets are rumoured to have been brought over by none other than Zheng He, the Chinese admiral who, according to Ming dynasty records, helmed seven “treasure voyages” between 1405 and 1433, reaching as far as East Africa. While historians agree that Kochi and other ports along the Malabar Coast were crucial stops on these voyages – peppercorns, locally dubbed “black gold”, being the most coveted product – some Kochi locals have gone further, claiming the city’s historical name of Cochin once meant “like China”.
