The legend of Dai Zong, the Divine Traveller

Every product has a story bolted on to it after the fact. This one is the other way round: the story is six hundred years old and the tape is new.

Dai Zong, the Divine Traveller

In Water Margin — the fourteenth-century novel that sits alongside Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms at the root of Chinese storytelling — there are a hundred and eight outlaws on Liangshan Marsh. Most of them are known for a weapon. One is known for his legs.

Dai Zong (戴宗) is the marshal of the messengers, and his nickname is 神行太保 — Shen Xing Tai Bao, the Divine Traveller. He carries dispatches. When the situation is urgent, he ties paper charms to his calves and covers five hundred li in a day. Tie four instead of two and the figure doubles: eight hundred li, roughly four hundred kilometres, between one dawn and the next.

The novel is precise about the procedure, which is the part people usually skip. He does not put the charms on and live in them. He binds them when he sets out. He runs. At the end of the journey he unties them, and burns them, and eats a vegetarian meal. The charm is spent. The next journey needs a new one.

Two charms, five hundred li. Four charms, eight hundred. Untie them at the end and burn them.

What the charms actually were

They are called 甲馬 — jiama, "armour horses", often translated as paper horses. In folk practice a jiama is a woodblock-printed charm on coarse paper, and the tradition is real and considerably older than the novel: printed sheets carrying a deity, a command, or a written formula, made cheaply, used once, and burned at the end. Yunnan still prints them by hand.

Binding one to the body is the oldest wearable technology China has. Not a fabric, not a fibre — a document, carried against the skin for the duration of one effort.

The writing on it

A 符 (fu) is a talisman written in brush and cinnabar on yellow ground. The word first meant a tally: a token broken in two so the halves could be matched to prove that an order was genuine. That is still the logic. A fu is a written instrument with a head, a body and a seal, read top to bottom like a memorial submitted to heaven, and written in a single pass — a charm that has been gone over twice is not, by convention, a charm.

The charm printed on our tape was written by a Daoist priest working in that tradition, with a brush, on paper. We reproduced it as written — not redrawn by a designer, not assembled from a font, not a stock "Chinese symbol" of the kind that turns out to mean nothing. If you can read it, it reads.

The full explanation of what a fu is →

Why it came back in 2026

In September 2026 a Chinese runner won the Tor des Géants — around 330 kilometres through the Aosta Valley with something near 24,000 metres of climbing — with yellow talisman tape down both legs. European spectators saw sports tape in an unusual colour. Chinese viewers saw Dai Zong, immediately, without needing it explained.

That is the whole appeal of the thing. It is not a new idea dressed in old clothes. It is an old idea that happens to fit a modern object exactly: something written, bound to the legs, carried through one long journey, taken off at the end.

What we make of it

We are a tape company, and we will not pretend otherwise. What ships is rayon face with hot-melt adhesive, latex free, five metres a roll, pre-cut into twenty strips of 5 by 25 centimetres. Four strips make one application, so a roll is five long days. It ships free, worldwide, from China.

What it does for a body is what any elastic sports tape does for a body. What it does for a head is older, and not ours to measure. We print the charm as the priest wrote it, and you decide what to do with it.

See the tape →