Why People Insist That Typhoons Steer Clear of Putuoshan

There’s a claim that has circulated along the Zhejiang-Jiangsu coast for a very long time: Putuoshan is watched over by Guanyin, so when a typhoon reaches it, the storm always detours around.

I’m not making this up. The internet is full of articles earnestly debating “why typhoons detour around Putuoshan,” and they tell it as something miraculous — the sacred ground of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, one of China’s four holy Buddhist mountains, the South Sea Guanyin statue standing right there; no matter how fierce the typhoon, once it reaches the island’s edge it turns aside on its own. Plenty of people believe it, and they say it with a certain “you may not believe me, but this is simply the fact” conviction.

Yet today, that claim is getting slapped down, hard.

Because of this year’s Typhoon No. 9, Bavi, Putuoshan’s passenger ferries have been suspended since July 9, Putuoshan International Airport canceled 14 flights on July 10, and every fishing boat and pleasure craft in the Putuo district was moved overnight to the western pier at Shenjiamen to ride out the storm. Guanyin didn’t make the typhoon detour around Putuoshan — she made the whole island close early. And this is with Bavi drifting toward southern Zhejiang, not even scoring a direct hit. The 2021 case needs no softening at all: Typhoon In-Fa made landfall along the coast of Zhoushan’s Putuo district, and the Putuoshan-Zhujiajian area was ground zero — more than 6,000 meters of road were swamped by seawater. (For the record: Putuoshan and Putuo district are both part of the city of Zhoushan — they’re not some other place beyond Zhoushan, they are the face Zhoushan turns toward the East China Sea.)

So the facts are clear: Putuoshan is no typhoon-proof zone. It stands directly in the typhoon’s path, and it’s taking a beating today. Which means the question worth asking isn’t “why can Guanyin block the typhoon,” but rather — why, in a place that has to suspend ferries and shut its gates for a typhoon every single year, do people still believe it’s under divine protection and that typhoons detour around it?

The answer to that question is far more interesting than the typhoon itself. Because if you swap out the word “Putuoshan” and drop in “a certain great product manager,” you don’t have to change a single word.

The people who get to say “the typhoon detoured” were themselves selected

Start with the part that stings the most.

“See, the typhoon detoured around Putuoshan again” — that sentence carries a hidden qualification to be spoken at all: only someone from a year nothing went wrong, only a mouth that didn’t happen to get blown over, gets the chance to say it.

The year In-Fa flooded Putuoshan-Zhujiajian, the people on the island were busy evacuating, patching things up, hauling waterlogged belongings to higher ground — nobody was in the mood to muse about “the Bodhisattva’s protection, the typhoon detoured.” And this year Bavi went south; Putuoshan suspended its ferries but wasn’t flipped over head-on, so in a few days the pilgrims will return to the island and that line — “see, Guanyin watches over this place” — will surface again as naturally as ever.

Every “the typhoon steers clear of Putuoshan” you hear comes from a year that happened not to take a direct hit, and a mouth that happened not to get blown over. The years something went wrong, the people who couldn’t have said that line at the time — they don’t fail to exist; it’s just that their voices never make it into the sample the “legend” is built from.

Statistics has a name for this: survivorship bias. Its most classic shape is exactly this: the person doing the talking is themselves the product of a filter. You think you’re observing a law of nature; in fact you’re only listening to the survivors — and a survivor will only ever tell you “how I made it through,” never what happened to the ones who didn’t, because the ones who didn’t make it don’t talk.

Worse, memory itself is a biased filter. Over twenty years a typhoon grazes past a dozen times and occasionally comes head-on; your brain automatically files the “grazed past” ones under “see, the Bodhisattva protected us again,” and files the one or two “head-on, roads flooded” times under “that year, fate was sealed” — one counted as a rule, the other as a fluke, purely on whether it flatters the thing you already wanted to believe.

What occasionally turns a typhoon away is the subtropical high, not Guanyin

Biased memory is only a passive error. Actively crediting “not getting hit” to Guanyin is one big step further into being wrong — that step is called misattribution.

Science does have an explanation for “Putuoshan occasionally dodges a typhoon.” Where a Western Pacific typhoon goes is mainly steered by the guiding airflow of the subtropical high. When the direction of that guiding airflow along the western edge of the high shifts, the typhoon turns somewhere over the East China Sea — this is a large-scale meteorological mechanism governing the entire sea area, not any single island. When Putuoshan occasionally “dodges” one, whether neighboring Taohua Island and Zhujiajian dodged it too is decided by the same guiding airflow — and it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether there’s a Bodhisattva on the island or how thick the incense smoke rises.

But the human mind has a stubborn flaw: faced with a phenomenon that can be explained by statistics and physics, we would much rather believe a version that has a protagonist. “A shift in the guiding airflow along the western edge of the subtropical high” is too cold, too devoid of warmth; “Guanyin reached out and pushed the typhoon away” has a protagonist, has will, has a story — and throws in a bonus dose of “I live in a place that’s protected” security to boot. So the correct-but-boring explanation gets tossed, and the moving-but-wrong one gets enshrined.

Remember this move: taking a structural, statistical phenomenon and attributing it to the mysterious power of a special agent. That’s the entire secret of the Putuoshan legend. And this move — you can watch it happen somewhere else every single day.

Swap “Putuoshan” for “a great product manager”

The product managers we worship for “seeing the future” were run through the same filter and then enshrined by the same misattribution.

Steve Jobs “prophesied” the smartphone; Jeff Bezos “foresaw” cloud computing; Jensen Huang “bet on GPUs ten years early.” Looking back, we treat them like prophets — like people who knew which way to run before the typhoon arrived. But note carefully: we call them prophets only because they bet right, and only in hindsight.

Among the people of their same era, equally confident, equally proclaiming “I’ve seen the future,” those who built the Newton handheld, built Web TV, built Google Glass, built every sort of “next big thing that will change the world” and died on the beach — there were tens of thousands of them. Their slide decks back then were just as thrilling, just as “I’ve seen the future”; they simply bet wrong. Those who bet wrong don’t make the “prophet” roster; they vanish straight out of the narrative — just like the Putuoshan that In-Fa flooded, which never makes it into the “typhoons detour around” legend.

“Prophet” and “protected by Guanyin” are the same thing: attributing survival to a mysterious power belonging to a particular agent. Putuoshan not getting hit is a matter of the guiding airflow; people remember it as Guanyin manifesting. A product manager landing the bet is a matter of survivorship bias plus repeated wagering; people remember it as a gift for foreseeing the future. One credits meteorology to the Bodhisattva, the other credits statistics to genius — it’s the identical cognitive move. You think you’re studying “why great product managers can foresee the future”; in fact you’re just retrofitting a myth onto a survivor.

So where’s the real difference between a master and a survivor?

If “prophet” is an illusion, then what, exactly, separates people like Jobs and Allen Zhang from an ordinary gambler?

It’s not that they can predict chaos. A typhoon’s precise track is a chaotic system; even the weather bureau, with a supercomputer, can only give you a probability two or three days out. Expecting a product manager to “foresee” where technology and the market are headed is the same as expecting a pilgrim, on the strength of devotion, to calculate whether the typhoon will turn — it’s mistaking luck for skill, mistaking meteorology for a miracle.

The real difference is two things, far plainer and far harder.

First, they bet often enough, and every bet was one they could afford. After Jobs returned to Apple it wasn’t one lucky hit — it was iMac, iPod, iPhone, App Store, wager after wager, and along the way he flipped cars like Ping and MobileMe. He didn’t land every shot; he stayed at the table, was never killed by being wrong, and ate full when he was right. Someone who bets only once — right is a miracle, wrong is elimination. Someone who can bet continuously for twenty years and can afford to lose each time — over the long run they’re bound to land a few big ones, and then get retroactively crowned a prophet. This isn’t foresight; it’s sustainable betting. The law of large numbers doesn’t need Guanyin.

Second, they don’t bet on the weather — they bet on constants. When Allen Zhang built WeChat, he wasn’t “predicting” that WeChat would win; he was betting that “people hate being interrupted” — a constant of human nature that hasn’t changed for decades and won’t for centuries, not a typhoon track that changes in the next second. The real masters share one sly habit: they don’t try to predict the unpredictable; they put their heavy bets on the things that “won’t change for a very long time.”

Chew on those two and you’ll find they’re the exact opposite of “Guanyin’s protection” and “the prophet’s gift.” The faith version is: there’s a mysterious power that can see through chaos and block the typhoon for me. The real master’s version is: I admit I can’t call the typhoon, so I don’t bet on where it goes at all — I only bet on sure things like “build the seawall high enough.” One bets on the unknowable, the other bets on certainty. The former is the raw material of survivorship bias; the latter is the only real moat.

Back to the pier that shut down today

So “will the typhoon detour around Putuoshan” is a question only a survivor would ask. It presumes a filtered, surviving point of view, then hunts inside it for a law that isn’t there, and finally chalks the credit up to the Bodhisattva.

The question that should actually be asked isn’t “will Guanyin block it for me,” but “if it comes head-on this time, can I take it?” The former hands your fate to luck, memory, and incense; the latter keeps your fate in the height of the seawall you built and the suspension order you issued in advance. What saved Putuoshan’s tourists today wasn’t the island’s incense — it was the ferries suspended on July 9 and the 14 canceled flights. It was the clear-eyed admission that you can’t block the typhoon, so you dodge it early — which is the exact opposite of the “detour legend.”

Products are the same. Don’t keep asking “is the direction I bet on right, did I see the future?” — that’s prophet worship, praying for a Guanyin of your own. Ask instead: If I bet wrong, do I die? If I bet right, do I eat full? Am I betting on weather that changes, or on human nature that doesn’t? Someone who can answer those three questions well doesn’t need to be a prophet, and doesn’t need a Bodhisattva. He only needs to be able to afford being wrong, then bet heavy on certainty, and leave the rest to time — time will retroactively crown him “the one who saw far,” just as it retroactively crowned every year that happened to escape a direct hit as “Guanyin manifesting.”

Today Bavi went south; Putuoshan suspended its ferries, shut down the island, and will most likely come through fine. But what let it dodge this one wasn’t Guanyin’s hand — it was the fickle mood of the subtropical high. Next time, if that airflow doesn’t turn, no Bodhisattva can stop it. And when that day comes, what saves people is never faith. It’s the seawall.