Seventeen Years After Four Failed Attempts, Zhang Xue Rides a Motorcycle 40.74 Kilometres Across Open Water

On Saturday morning, on the Jinjiang river in Mayang County, Hunan, a motorcycle rode out across the water and did not stop for 32 minutes. The rider was Zhang Xue, founder of the motorcycle brand that carries his name, and the 40.74 kilometres he covered set a Guinness World Record for the longest distance travelled on open water by a modified motorcycle.

For Zhang, the run closed an account opened in 2009, when he was a young mechanic trying to make a motorcycle skim across water — the stunt Chinese riders call shuishang piao, "floating on water." He tried four times that year and fell in four times; the longest glide was about twenty metres. In an interview earlier this year, his first master — the mechanic he calls Ya Ge — recalled trying to talk him out of the project: the bike was too small, the engine too weak. Zhang kept welding anyway, burning through wires and a welding machine. When the machine finally sank in a river, his master's parting instruction was blunt: if you fall in, fish it out yourself. Zhang, who does not swim well, ended up calling the master for help — a story he has told with the rest of his apprenticeship lore.

The machine that succeeded on Saturday is a different proposition. The MX450 carries a single-cylinder engine developed in-house by Zhang's company, and the critical modification is a pair of steel paddles welded to the front and rear wheels — narrower than the first version, roughly half the original width, a deliberate trade of buoyancy for agility in turns. When the Australian stunt rider Robbie Maddison rode a motorcycle on water in 2017, he used paddles cut from a surfboard; Zhang's team rebuilt the idea in steel, a detail the technical explainer that ran after the record spent most of its length on.

The run was also a homecoming, and Mayang treated it as one. The county party secretary, Liao Yuanxi, showed up in motorcycle gear, and when Zhang offered to run an advertisement for local produce during the livestream, Liao refused: "Zhang Xue himself is Mayang's best advertisement." The county's speciality rock-candy oranges are still in stock, Liao added; the brown sugar has sold out entirely. Zhang handed the county his record certificate and the motorcycle afterwards, and the two men sprayed champagne together. His wife had ridden a Zhang Xue bike for four days from Chongqing to be there — a detail that travelled on its own.

Zhang gave his own performance 99 points out of 100, holding back the last point, he said, "so I don't get too proud." He admitted the stakes felt real: "If I hadn't succeeded, it would have been very embarrassing, so I was careful."

Why the story travelled is the more interesting question. Zhang Xue is one of China's most-followed motorcycle personalities, a small-town mechanic who turned a stunt into a manufacturing brand, and his record run doubled as a commercial for a county most outsiders could not place on a map. Huaihua, the city that administers Mayang, has already appointed him an ambassador for local tourism — the kind of institutional courtship that Chinese county economies, competing for tourists and investment, have turned into standard practice. The challenge filled Baidu's search board through the weekend, from the champagne celebration to the crowd meme that "everyone was waiting for Zhang Xue to use the toilet" during the long holds before the run.

It may not stop at records, either. In an interview aired on Sunday, Zhang said that once this project is done, "we'll go run around Kinmen — from Xiamen out to Kinmen and back around." Kinmen is the Taiwan-controlled island that sits within sight of Xiamen's skyline, and a motorcycle circling it across the water is a stunt with geopolitical overtones — which is presumably why CCTV's interview clip let the sentence stand, unedited, in its headline.