Floating on a single-bamboo-pole on Chishui River, Guizhou province.

He clutches another shorter pole, about 5-m-long, with both hands.

The 42-year-old lifts one foot and thrusts forward. For a moment, his body is parallel to the floating bamboo, and he looks like "a swallow slightly touching the water's surface", as the move is termed.

Wang's friends, who watch from an islet in the river, taunt him: "You're too old. You can't hold the position for three seconds."

The middle-aged man may not have the agile body of a teenager. But he has the best balance of the bunch.

As coach of this unique sport called "single-bamboo-pole rafting", he leads a ragtag team of fishermen, construction workers and teachers in preserving a tradition that's almost 300 years old.

Chishui River has been a transportation route for 2,000 years. Bamboo was used to make rafts or was sent drifting downstream for sale.

The 500-km-long river originates in Yunnan province, but it's not suitable for shipping until the tri-province area of Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan. The waterway empties into the Yangtze River.

In the old days, boatmen had to maneuver the treacherous bends and rapids.

When poles drifted away from the bundle, they had to pull them back or they would pay for the loss. In this line of work, they developed the nimbleness needed to stand on a single pole, using it like a canoe.

This tradition was lost until the 1960s-70s, when it found a most unusual source of revival.

The local government, for the nominal purposes of celebrating Chairman Mao Zedong's swimming of the Yangtze River and preparing to "liberate Taiwan", encouraged the activity as a sport.

It has since been preserved, but fewer than 100 people have mastered it. That's because modern roads have replaced the watercourse as a transport route for bamboo.

And "single-pole-rafting" has yet to receive central government recognition as either a sport or an acrobatic performance. But that hasn't deterred Wang Guohong and his friends from practicing.

Over a stretch of water in Chishui city, which is named after the river, they execute formations like a marching band, with beautiful Chen Xuemei in the lead and all the men following in two columns, or forming a conga line.

They also perform several stunts, such as doing the splits and jumping onto one another's poles. The fun is contagious. There are always big laughs when someone falls off a pole and into the current.

Each practice session lasts 10 to 15 minutes, Wang says, because it strains both your upper body and your legs.

"It's almost like working on a balancing beam while it moves," he says.

But there's a secret: Big poles, which range from 15 to 24 cm in diameter, usually have a slight curve. Finding the lowest point in the middle makes it easy to keep balance.

Unlike the beam or the tightrope, a bamboo pole can roll, which requires constant adjustment of the feet.

Fun is what Wang and his teammates crave. There is no money to be made from the activity, even though a local team won a gold prize at a 1999 national ethnic minority tournament.

But bamboo has been good for the people of Chishui. About half of the city's wooded area, or 70,000 hectares, are covered with the plant.

Because bamboo is a highly renewable resource - one of the species grows 1 m a day - an annual harvest of 4 million poles has made it a major industry.

"Some families rent 150 to 200 hectares and earn more than 100,000 yuan ($14,630) a year," city official Zeng Qiang says.

Xinyu Bamboo Company employs 300 people and brings in annual revenues totaling some 100 million yuan.

Its bamboo products include the mundane (chopsticks and cutting boards), the unusual (floor panels and furniture) and the fancy (bamboo books that recall the pre-paper era of Confucius and ancient classics).

And guess what? Bamboo can now be processed into paper.

"Don't worry about cracking or rotting. Our products are sold all across the country and even to India, Poland, South Korea and Japan. We have squeezed all liquid and sugar from the bamboo," manager Li Xianhong explains.

According to Li, Xinyu has six product lines featuring 250 products. It uses 0.8 million to 1 million bamboo poles a year, putting a total of 12 million yuan into farmers' pockets.

That's something Li Litai could have been proud of.

Li was a Fujian native who went to Guizhou in 1755 as a migrant worker. He made some money, bought a house and some land, married and settled down.

In 1769, he went back to his hometown to persuade his mother to move with him to mountainous Guizhou. But she didn't want to leave.

As a souvenir, Li dug up four local bamboo seedlings and carried them with him on his way back - a way of remembering each of his siblings.

Three of the seedlings survived the 4,000-km odyssey. He planted them in his backyard, and pretty soon his house was surrounded by bamboo groves.

Realizing the benefits offered by this species, called nanzhu, villagers came for seedlings, which Li generously gave away. Decades later, whole mountains were covered with nanzhu bamboo. Today, 20,000 hectares of this giant bamboo grows where Li used to live.

Chishui, as a city, is the second largest grower of bamboo, right after all of Fujian province, Li's hometown. Today, Chishui people consider Li "the father of nanzhu bamboo".

Back at the river, Wang Guohong is walking back and forth on a pole as if it were a dancing rope. Sometimes he is ankle-deep or knee-deep in water, but the poles (the smaller one in his hands) are like his magic wand. They enable him to wow a la "bathing beauty".

Chinese call a wide expanse of bamboo "the bamboo sea". It sways in the wind, evoking an infinite variety of poetic moods. Even submerged in water, bamboo can sway and hold you steady.

It has an outward pliancy and a hidden tenacity that reflects the people who grow it and are now supported by it.