Sea-related novel is an important type of ancient Chinese literature. There are many works from Six Dynasties to Ming and Qing Dynasties. Based on the changes of marine narrative elements, the development of ancient Chinese sea-related novels can be divided into four periods with Pre-Qin Dynasty to Han Dynasty as the gestation period, the period of Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties as the beginning period, Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties as the developing period, Ming and Qing Dynasties as the mature period. By combing the development of Chinese ancient novel sea writing, we can see that the ancient Chinese sea-related novels have experienced narrative evolution from imagination to credible knowledge, from myth to legend to documentary to conscious literary fiction.