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CHAPTER TWO

The Slaves of Guangzhou

FROM WHAT HAS preceded, the southeastern coastal city of Guangzhou has already emerged as a pivotal locale, for it serves as a conspicuous nexus for helping to further not only our knowledge of the circumstances of China’s premodern “blacks” but also our understanding of their situation in relation to the Chinese institution of slavery. What follows is an exposition and analysis of what—apart from the official histories—appears to be the only nonfictional source within the slim body of available evidence that strongly suggests the substantial presence of what we by convention would deem to have been racially or ethnically black slaves inside middle-period China.¹ As the late scholar C. Martin Wilbur prosaically observed: “Foreign slaves were very popular with the cosmopolitan upper classes of the [Tang] period…. Dark-skinned [kunlun] slaves, certainly negroid, were very popular; references to them go back to the fourth and fifth centuries. In [Tang] times some [kunlun] slaves may have been African negroes imported by Arab traders.”²

The account of the surprising existence and servitude of such slaves of African origin as Wilbur describes presents us with their circumstances during the succeeding era of the Song period. Constituting more clusters or groupings of discrete individuals than real colonies, these slaves were by no means geographically dispersed across China but preponderantly aggregated in only one place, what was already by then the populous coastal locality of Guangzhou. This site, if recognized by latter-day Westerners at all, was—until remarkably recently—far better known in later centuries by the peculiar imperialist corruption of a name it came to bear, Canton. (See Figure 2.)³ The record on which I rely and which affords this discerning description—the earliest and most extensive privately written one of which I am aware—is called Pingzhou ketan (Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile), a relatively short work in three Chinese scrolls or fascicles called juan, which serve functionally as chapters.⁴ Its author was a scholar and minor official of the Song Dynasty named Zhu Yu (1075?–after 1119).⁵

Figure 2. Map of Guangzhou and environs in Qiu Juchuan, ed., Yangcheng guchao [Ancient Documents on Yangcheng], vol. 1. (ca. 1800; repr., Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1969), 65–66.

However, at the same time that I hope to exploit this crucial text, I am also compelled to begin with a cautionary caveat. Even when pored over and mined exhaustively, Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile offers us a picture of eleventh-century Guangzhou’s black slaves that is still far less complete than any of us might like to have, and anyone who anticipates a description extracted from this source that is either definitive or conclusive is destined to be roundly disappointed. On the contrary, the description is neither precise nor expansive; the depth of detail that we as moderns desire to have and to which we have grown accustomed to expecting is simply not forthcoming; the resultant portrait hardly surpasses being much more than a fragmentary and fragile allusion. Thus, on the one hand, my own inclination to bring this description to light is interlaced with and tempered by ambivalence about its ultimate value. By my assessment, the description afforded is yet another classic example of one of those all-too-frequently-encountered and all-too-vexing discoveries that, for the historian, raises perhaps even more questions than it does answer. However, on the other hand, if our knowledge about the shadowy intersections in the histories of disparate cultural zones—specifically two such zones that are conventionally interpreted as having been so disparate as Africa and China—is to be advanced at all, then the description of the black slaves of China offered in Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile deserves greater exposure than it has heretofore had, for it surely represents one that is worth the telling.

Of Text and Context

For someone so well positioned as a potential participant within the mainstream of the civil service ideal of the Song period, Zhu Yu, the author of Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile, remains a man about whom we know painfully little. Although known to have hailed from the region that is now modern coastal Zhejiang Province, an area that supplied many of the state’s bureaucrats from mid-Song times onward, no record mentions that Zhu Yu ever served in an official capacity. This situation forces us to conclude that he was never elevated—either through the channel of the civil service examinations or by recommendation—to any official post.⁶ Thus, in the case of Zhu Yu, one of the most reliable portals for our acquiring in-depth knowledge about the lives of even relatively minor Song figures—that is, a career of any duration as an officeholder—is unavailable to us.

However, this dearth of knowledge about the author of Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile as an independent personality is not fatal, for it is abundantly compensated for by what we know of the career, pursuits, and experiences of Zhu Yu’s father—the much more prominent and diversely experienced government official Zhu Fu (1048–after 1102).⁷ Moreover, to our great fortune, the research of the contemporary scholar Li Weiguo, in his 1986 foreword (qianyan) to a punctuated edition of Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile, affords us some indispensable details regarding Zhu Yu’s family origins and the nature of his standing within the family lineage. We learn that Zhu Yu’s

Grandfather was Zhu Lin [fl. ca. 1025–90], who served as an official in the post of assistant director in the Palace Library (bicheng) and who, among his works, wrote the Personal Record of the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu siji) and the Outer Record of the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu waiji).

[His] father was Zhu Fu, who was styled Xingzhong. While he was young, Zhu Yu was dependent on his mother’s Hu family and resided at Changzhou. Later, he accompanied his father during his service as an official to Kaifeng and such prefectures as Lai and Run. At the beginning of the Chongning era (1102–7), they arrived at Guangzhou; they had only a short time earlier gone to the Southern Sea (Nanhai) to see Su Shi [1036–1101].⁸

The visit with Su Shi had to have occurred between the years 1097 and 1100. The fact that Zhu Fu was on intimate enough terms with Su, who was probably the most highly regarded litterateur of the day, to visit with him in the region of the Southern Sea affords us important clues regarding not only the grandeur of the elder Zhu’s social and intellectual connectedness but also very likely the directions of his political courage, for Su was, at that time, the loser in a factional power struggle and in the midst of his second and final exile from court and capital on remote Hainan Island (Hainan dao).⁹ Hainan was a sweltering and pest-infested zone of mostly aboriginal population that constituted then, as it does now, the southernmost extreme of the Chinese world. Especially during Song times, which were rife with factional infighting, to visit with the vanquished who had been consigned by the victors to banishment in such a remote and hostile place was to make a loud and clear statement, and it suggests that Zhu Fu felt owing to no one with respect to the advancement or the retardation of his career.

By contrast to that of his father, Zhu Yu’s “career,” should we choose to call it such, being an unusual one by the standards of his times, must be assessed quite differently. Even as an adult estimably in his twenties, the younger Zhu evidently spent much (if not all) of his time as a kind of voluntary shadow of his more distinguished father, literally trailing after him on his various assignments during his years of sundry service. To be sure, the proof of how well connected Zhu Yu was via his father Fu is clearly borne out in the passage by what appears to have been more than a passing acquaintance with the great Su Shi. However, one senses strongly that Zhu Yu was included in such a vaunted social circle only because of the friendship between the prestigious literatus and his father.

Indeed, Zhu Yu does not appear to have ever voluntarily endeavored to establish either a name or a position for himself. While it was unquestionably an uncommon path to take for that time, there are nonetheless some plausible explanations for his having taken it.¹⁰ However, the absence of a certifiable rationale for it notwithstanding, foremost in importance for us is that we prepare ourselves for the exertion of the “partnership” between father and son on the content of Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile. This connection through lineage of the two Zhus will profoundly influence our understanding of and appreciation for the text that Zhu Yu wrote. This is the case because, if the contentions of traditional scholars are indeed correct, the observations, encounters, and experiences that supply much (if not most) of the material for the narrative of the book are predominantly those of the father Zhu Fu channeled and, on occasion, perhaps filtered or embellished through the son Zhu Yu.¹¹

Evaluation of the internal chronology of Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile also supports this conclusion that Zhu Yu’s main contribution throughout the book was that of providing the extensive prosopopoeial service of speaking in the voice of Zhu Fu, bringing his likely already deceased father’s views and observations back to life, for the generally accepted date of authorship for the work is the year 1119. Scholars have deduced this date mainly from the fact that the events—some noteworthy and others quite ordinary—recounted in Zhu Yu’s book all occurred between the years 1056 and 1118.¹² However, there are also sound reasons for proffering a somewhat earlier date of composition, one near the conclusion of the eleventh century, for the material pertaining to Guangzhou. Such is the case because Zhu Yu prominently mentions the years 1086 and 1099 with reference to that city,¹³ with the latter year especially closely corresponding to the period of Zhu Fu’s tenure of office there. Consequently, yet another tenable explanation of Zhu Yu’s role in relation to Zhu Fu is that, as the son of a high official, the author mainly functioned quite intentionally, deliberately, and self-effacingly as recorder and raconteur of his father’s far richer life experiences.