Fitting for the Lunar New Year is a video featuring one of the animals of the Chinese zodiac that has gone viral on the internet; that of a monkey which crosses a river in Nanjing using only its hands and a makeshift bamboo raft.
The video, filmed recently by an unnamed source, has reminded many of the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, a central protagonist in one of the four classics of Chinese literature that is “Journey to the West”.
“Splendid Monkey King! He leapt on to his somersault cloud, crossed the seventy miles of lake, and saw that on the other side there was indeed a city wall, a moat, streets, markets, ten thousand houses, a thousand gates, and people coming and going in the sunlight”, is an excerpt from chapter three of the novel.
No wonder the video has become such a hot property on the Chinese internet.
Having presumably stolen the makeshift raft which comprises two bamboo poles lashed together, our monkey in Nanjing first pushes off from a rock on one side of the 10-metre wide river.
Appearing quite at home on the raft and unperturbed at the prospect of falling into the river, the monkey even pauses to scoop a handful of water to drink while it drifts toward to other bank.
But the raft then collides with a tree trunk, bringing it to a stop a couple of metres short of the far bank. It is here that our creative friend begins to paddle the raft around the trunk to come alongside the bank.
Crossing complete, it was then a piece of cake for the monkey to alight from the raft and climb the rocks on the other side of the river.
The video that has been published by The Paper can be seen via this link.
Back in Journey to the West, and just like our little monkey, Sun would also have made light work of the river in Nanjing. But being able to do a single somersault over a distance of over 50,000 kilometres, Sun would have had little need to resort to stealing.
