Leiden University Libraries Digital Collections

Text in simplified characters (Jiantizi)
At Sea's Chinese name, Hai shang, echoes its place of production, Shanghai. The editors-including Hai Ke, Liu Manliu, Momo, Meng Lang, and Yuyu-and most of the journal's contributors are from Shanghai.
The first issue's cover displays a visual style that is fairly characteristic for early 1980s journals and partakes of an aesthetic that goes back to earlier moments in twentieth-century cultural history.
In 1990, the journal's final issue would cite its ambition to "Protect Poetry" at the same time as announcing its self-termination. An editorial afterword names the increasing divergence of the original contributors' individual styles as the reason for terminating the journal. This phenomenon holds more widely for the poetry scene's transition from the 1980s to the 1990s, which was catalyzed by the government's suppression of the 1989 Protest Movement, remembered as June Fourth.
The journal published a total of four issues between 1985-1990; facsimile reproductions of these issues were published in 2018 (4 volumes in one case).