Song dynasty painting gives us the first clear image of a fishing reel

Story: 1150 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 1150

In 1195 C.E., a Chinese court painter named Ma Yuan sat down — or instructed a skilled hand — to render a solitary fisherman on a winter lake. The man perches in a small sampan, line cast out into still, cold water. What makes the painting extraordinary, centuries later, is what it shows attached to his rod: a clearly identifiable fishing reel, the earliest unambiguous graphic depiction of the device in the historical record.

What the evidence shows

• Fishing reel history: The earliest known image of a fishing reel appears in Ma Yuan’s 1195 C.E. Southern Song painting Angler on a Wintry Lake, now held at the Tokyo National Museum.
• Chinese angling records: Textual references to line-winding devices called “angling lathes” stretch back to a 3rd-century C.E. Chinese work, Lives of Famous Immortals — nearly a thousand years before Ma Yuan picked up his brush.
• Song dynasty technology: Northern Song scientist Shen Kuo (1031–1095 C.E.) described the reel’s design in a travel book, specifying the right bamboo, wheel size, and line length — evidence that practical reel knowledge was already well-established before 1195 C.E.

A thousand years in the making

The fishing reel did not appear fully formed in the Southern Song. It arrived trailing a long paper trail.

The term “angling lathe” (釣車) turns up in a 3rd-century C.E. Chinese text. Tang dynasty poets Lu Guimeng and Pi Rixiu — both passionate anglers who lived in the 800s C.E. — wrote about their reels with the casualness of people describing familiar tools. Pi even described a reel given to him as a gift: “an angle-handled wheel that is smooth and light.” These were not exotic devices. They were everyday equipment for people who loved to fish.

By the Song dynasty (960–1279 C.E.), the reel had become thoroughly embedded in Chinese literary and intellectual life. Poets like Huang Tingjian and Yang Wanli worked it into their verse. Scientist Shen Kuo recorded its specifications. The 1195 C.E. painting by Ma Yuan — catalogued by historian of science Joseph Needham as the earliest known graphic depiction — crystallizes all of that accumulated knowledge into a single quiet image of a man fishing on a lake.

From windlass to fishing rod

How did the fishing reel come to exist at all? The most likely answer is that early Chinese engineers borrowed from existing technology. Windlasses and winches — devices for winding rope or cord under tension — were already in use across ancient China for lifting, construction, and siege machinery. Adapting that basic mechanical principle to a fishing rod was a short conceptual leap for people who worked with line and load every day.

The early Chinese designs, with their simple wooden or bamboo wheels, closely resemble what is now called a centerpin reel — a free-spinning drum that lets line run out smoothly and can be wound back in by hand. It was not a precision instrument. It was elegant in its simplicity, and it worked.

What made the Song dynasty moment significant was not invention but codification. The 1195 C.E. painting did something that poetry and travel notes could not: it gave future generations an image they could actually see and study. Alongside two woodblock print illustrations of fishing reels in a book printed between 1208 and 1224 C.E., and a later depiction in the Chinese encyclopedia Sancai Tuhui (1609 C.E.), Ma Yuan’s painting forms part of a tiny, precious visual record — Joseph Needham’s research identified only five images of fishing reels predating 1651 C.E. in the entire world.

How the reel traveled west

Fishing reels did not appear in England until around 1650 C.E. — roughly 450 years after Ma Yuan’s painting, and more than a millennium after the first Chinese textual references. Thomas Barker’s The Art of Angling, published in 1651 C.E., contains the first English-language description of a reel: a barrel mounted on a rod with a handle for winding, designed for trout fishing. An Armenian parchment Gospel from the 13th century C.E. also shows what appears to be a reel, suggesting the technology may have traveled through multiple routes across Eurasia.

By the 1760s C.E., London tackle shops were openly advertising multiplying reels. American designs followed in the early 1800s C.E. The Kentucky Reel — built by watchmaker George Snyder around 1810 C.E. — adapted English models into a precision bait-casting instrument, and mass production eventually brought recreational fishing to a much wider public.

In the 20th century C.E., Japanese and Scandinavian manufacturers including Shimano and Daiwa — companies with roots in precision engineering for bicycles and watches — rose to dominate the global market, completing a long arc from a bamboo wheel on a Song dynasty sampan to a precision-engineered spool on a sport boat in the open ocean.

Lasting impact

The fishing reel changed what fishing could be. Before it, line length was limited to what a person could hold, cast by hand, or manage with a simple pole. A reel meant longer lines, deeper water, and the ability to retrieve a fish without losing control of the line. It made recreational angling practical for a far wider range of people and environments.

The downstream effects compound over centuries. The reel enabled fly fishing as we know it. It made competitive casting possible. It contributed to a global recreational fishing industry that today involves hundreds of millions of participants and sustains significant conservation interest in freshwater and marine ecosystems. Efforts like Ghana’s marine protected area at Cape Three Points and broader debates about sustainable fisheries owe something, however indirectly, to a culture of caring about fish and water that recreational fishing helped build.

The reel also demonstrates something important about the history of technology: major innovations rarely arrive in a single flash. They accumulate across generations, geographies, and traditions — often invisibly — until one moment of documentation makes them legible to history.

Blindspots and limits

The historical record here is fragmentary. China produced the earliest surviving evidence, but it is genuinely possible that independent reel-like devices developed elsewhere and simply were not documented or have not survived. The Armenian parchment Gospel reference, brief and less clear than the Chinese images, hints at parallel development. It is also worth noting that Ma Yuan’s original painting now sits in the Tokyo National Museum as a result of the looting of the Old Summer Palace in 1860 C.E. — a fact that colors the transmission of this particular piece of history. The fishing communities who actually used these early reels — working fishers, not court painters or poets — left almost no record of their own perspective on the tools they depended on.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Fishing reel

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

• Ghana establishes a marine protected area at Cape Three Points
• Indigenous land rights recognition reaches 160 million hectares ahead of COP30
• The Good News for Humankind archive on the medieval era

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