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CHAPTER ONE

From History’s Mists

EVEN THE MERE suggestion of the existence of blacks in the China of premodern times no doubt strikes many readers as a novel, if not wholly outlandish, concept. It is an idea that the mind seems to resist reflexively, and even as so much of today’s revisionist scholarship continues its contestation of the myth of ancient-world isolation, many factors also conspire to elicit this unyieldingly incredulous manner of reaction to the suggestion. In my making the counterintuitive case for a black presence in early China, my situation strikes me as not differing greatly from that of the historian Jack Forbes, who—in his recent study of the speculative transatlantic forays of early native Americans into European waters—remarks, “Most people generally have probably never heard of the idea that ancient Americans might have traveled to other parts of the globe.”¹ In other words, whether possessing the corroborating evidence or not, for one to tender such a contention is at least to run the risk—perhaps justifiably—of inviting disbelief.

Although I will make the contrarian case for its rapid diminution in the concluding chapter of this book, the resistance, even outright hostility, customarily incited in the modern mind by the idea of contact in remote antiquity between representatives of cultures situated on widely dispersed continents is far from extinguished, and several conventional assumptions serve to reinforce it. We need only return to the case at hand to begin to account for some of the factors that engender disbelief in the idea of contact anciently between China and continental Africa.

We can begin by simply acknowledging the sheer distance separating the two places. As if this objective fact were not daunting enough, we cannot deny that this distance was likely all the more vast psychologically, almost to the point of being unfathomable, in the days before sail-powered, compass-directed navigation emerged to provide the most advanced of all means over the almost unthinkable concept of travel by horseback or on foot between these disparate regions.

Whereas the physical distance in mileage between China and Africa serves as an obvious and objective divisor for everyone, especially for Westerners with limited knowledge of either place, we must also add a subjective factor—that is, the mental distance created by the inability to penetrate the residual veneer of exoticism attached to both locations. The proclivity for succumbing to the notion of China and Africa as inherently “exotic”—and thus existing apart from our normal realm of experience—not only has the potential for veiling each locale hermetically from the other but also can lead to the stifling of earnest inquiry by inclining us summarily to preclude all possibility of conceivable interchange between the two irreducibly distinct geographical zones. Therefore, an overweening susceptibility to the influence of exoticism can result in a kind of masking or shrouding mental partition that interposes itself between us and China or Africa, thus resulting in an insurmountable mental barrier that reinforces the isolation of each place from the other, rendering them both mutually impenetrable.

Surely most prominent among the conspiratorial factors that engender incredulousness at the very idea of the presence of substantial numbers of blacks in early China is empirical. It is also the most simplistic and insidious factor because it involves our incapacity to refrain from projecting the present-day situation onto the past. As any visit to China today is likely to reveal, blacks, meaning individuals of African ancestry and descent, are certainly by far the most underrepresented of all those ostensible races or ethnicities either temporarily or permanently now inhabiting the Chinese landscape. Therefore, based mainly on our observation of the paucity to near-total absence of blacks from the Chinese contemporary scene, it is quite natural to impute a comparable dearth of “blackness” back onto the past of several centuries ago. Consequently, hindsight informed by present-day realities leads us to the same conclusion with regard to the plausibility of blacks ever inhabiting early China that we would likely draw regarding the circumstances of any people who are scarcely and marginally represented in a particular place at any time. We assume that if they are not there in discernible numbers now, then they cannot ever have been so. Yet, while this kind of assumption is understandable and uncomplicated, as is so often the case with history, the truer and more intriguing conclusions emerge from those many instances in which the presumptive conclusion proves to be false. The present inquiry represents precisely such an example in which the imputation of the present situation back onto that of the remote past could not be more misguided or erroneous.

Moreover, in addition to the need to prepare ourselves for the adoption of an accepting attitude toward the historical complexities and outcomes involved, we cannot account for the experiences of blacks in China and among the Chinese of early historical times without also undertaking and effectuating some crucial recasting or reorienting in our thinking. Two such reorientations are absolutely crucial. Surely the first reorientation required of us is that we at least accede to the idea that blacks might well have long ago lived in China—that is, through a suspension of our initial disbelief, we must accept the premise that they might have actually been present there at some remotely earlier time of a millennium or more ago. A second and equally important reorientation demanded of us is that we immediately endeavor to expand our ethnological notion of what blackness means and how this condition of being might now differ ontologically and crucially from what it might have meant in the early Chinese context.

To be sure, the principal concern herein is with the peoples of African heritage and descent in their engagement with the Chinese. However, it is by no means with such an engagement that our story can begin, for premodern Chinese thought of and referred to a great variety of the peoples whom they encountered as black. At the same time that it remains foremost, we must endeavor to permit the Sino-African nexus to become our culminating concern because, as Frank Dikötter remarks in his landmark work on modern race consciousness, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, numerous peoples became black for the Chinese, even if, owing to a dearth of contact with them, they had not previously been regarded as being so prior to those times.² We will learn that, especially with their more frequent interaction with neighboring foreigners resulting from the extensively expanded maritime activity of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Common Era, the Chinese cast this ascription of blackness ever more widely. This hypothesis of accretion and conflation whereby Chinese first attributed the trait of blackness indiscriminately and somewhat uniformly to any and all peoples of darker complexions than themselves seems more than plausible. It was first hypothesized by Paul Pelliot, who suggested that the attribute of blackness may well have been first assigned to “Indonesian Negritos,” who, of course, bear no connection to “African negroes,” and yet over time became extended and affixed, without any particular distinctions, to both groups.³

Thereby, largely resulting from increasing exposure to ever-larger numbers of peoples rarely or never before encountered but also out of ignorance stemming from confusion over the origins of the profusion of new populations confronted, the Chinese gradually came to affix the designation “black” to peoples of widely divergent and far-flung locales, all of whom are now recognized as representatives of distinctly different ethnicities. Documents of the Tang Dynasty and earlier refer to the Nam-Viet peoples of Champa as black. In subsequent writings the Khmers, Malaysians, and Malaccans (in Malayu, Melakans) are considered black. Blackness also became attributed indiscriminately to the Ceylonese (Sri Lankan), Malabar, and Bengali peoples of the Indian subcontinent as well as to those inhabiting the Andaman Islands.⁴ Much of the assignment of blackness to these various foreign groups was arbitrary and subjective and involved relative description. Moreover, it resulted largely from a process of ascription mainly by contradistinction, for as Dikötter points out, premodern Chinese had, from ancient times, been inclined to think of themselves, at least in comparison to many of their darker-skinned outer neighbors, as white.⁵ However, for our purposes, of greatest significance is the fact that, once they were encountered in later centuries, there was nothing to preclude the easy inclusion of Africans under this generalized, indeterminate, and randomly amorphous rubric of stigmatizing blackness. Needless to say, their consignment to this category of being would prove to be fateful from the very time it began, just as it still is.

Geographies of Otherness

A distinguishing feature of Chinese civilization is that place of origin or habitat has consistently predominated over skin color as a marker of foreignness and hence otherness. Beginning with the numerous references in such classical literature as the Zuo Commentary (Zuo zhuan) of the classic Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu),⁶ the four principal clusters of “barbarians” (siyi), the Yi, Di, Rong, and Mân, against whom the Chinese struggled for mastery of the Central Plain (Zhongyuan) in the first millennium B.C.E. were foremost denoted not by any perceptible physical distinctions in appearance or even culture (though the latter was certainly a level of distinction made) but instead by distinctions in location. Although there were numerous subgroups incorporated under each heading, the Yi, in addition to becoming the most common generic term for “barbarian,”⁷ eventually evolved to denote strictly those non-Chinese tribes of the east; the Di, the north; the Rong, the west; and the Mân, the south.

Such cultural distinctions as in language must surely have existed between what eventually emerged as the ethnically Han Chinese and their non-Han or fan neighbors. However, even while scholars have made progress in their reconstruction, these linguistic differences remain highly imprecise and largely dependent on speculation.⁸ Conversely, we can be certain of the fact that these surrounding tribes occupied different and, by and large, prescribed locations in relation to the Chinese that nonetheless set them physically apart from them. Consequently, in China from earliest times geography has been perhaps the most powerful determinant in demarcating us from them, and—as a construct for distinguishing the distinctiveness of the other—it has remained constant and exceptionally resilient, continuing up to contemporary times. Historically, much as is still the case, distinguishing the other was a process marked first by determining alienness in the most literal of senses—that is, by construing that the other in question necessarily hailed at least originally from a different place.

Nonetheless, if only because of its overwhelming importance nearly everywhere in our times, the comparative unimportance of skin color to the Chinese as an indicator of foreignness is striking. Differentiation in skin color persisted as only a secondary determinant of foreignness well into modern times, and the fact that such was the case for as long as it was invites explanation. We can begin by observing that, at least in prehistoric and earliest historical times, the skin colors of the different peoples the Chinese confronted and with whom they coexisted likely varied only within a fairly narrow range. In other words, limited in their contacts largely by topographical constraints and barriers, the ancient Chinese tended to meet others who were not that dramatically different in terms of the physical feature of skin pigmentation from themselves. Relative geographical isolation as well as other constrictive factors in comparison to other major world civilizations would lead to this situation not changing for China and its inhabitants for a substantial length of time. As such, the exposure of Chinese from earliest historical times only to peoples not drastically differing from themselves in terms of skin color stands as one of the very few myths of an “unchanging China” that evinces any credibility.

Nevertheless, as was to be the case in every other area of cross-cultural interaction, Chinese insulation from exposure to various peoples of markedly different skin coloration was destined inevitably to change. The first encounters between Chinese and persons they described as black, including the subset of those who were very possibly of African origin, occurred significantly earlier than we might think. Writing in The Star Raft: China's Encounter with Africa, a study that was heretofore singular for its combination of informed scholarship and accessibility on the subject, Philip Snow saliently—if some what indeterminately—observes, “Dark-skinned people were talked of in China as early as the fourth century” of the Common Era.⁹ However, perhaps as noteworthy as the physical presence of the blacks among them is the fact that the Chinese elected to refer to these people not by a term denoting color but instead by one with its roots firmly entrenched in geography—that is, by a place-name that primordially and preeminently denotes location and not color. In sum, given a multitude of choices, whatever term is used to signify the other always seems preferentially to have indicated a different situation within the Chinese world order in spatial terms rather than an often quite obviously discerned difference in skin color.

Although we know that its history of usage is quite venerable, we can never expect to determine precisely when the term kunlun first entered into Chinese parlance. We can, however, know with absolute certainty that the term initially had nothing whatsoever to do with skin color, let alone blackness of skin. Kunlun first appears in the literature in association with the biography of Mu Wang or King Mu (r. ca. 976–922 B.C.E.), the fifth monarch of the Zhou Dynasty (ca. 1050–256 B.C.E.), for he is said to have several times visited—by means of a royal chariot drawn by eight magnificent steeds—the range of mountains that today bears that name.¹⁰ The Kunlun Mountains—a genuine site—comprise the dominant massif of the northwest quadrant of China, extending into Tibet.¹¹ The source that provides us with this information—Mu Tianzi zhuan (Biography of Son of Heaven Mu)—is anonymously written and of indeterminate age.¹² However, just as important as its reportage on King Mu’s alleged travel to the distant Kunlun Mountains is the fact that it also designates this mountain range as the abode of the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu), the ancient Chinese deity with foreign precedents that was eventually appropriated by religious Daoism as a goddess of immortality said to rule over its western paradise of immortals.¹³

The brief foregoing explication, of course, purveys information that is at the intersection of legend and myth. Nonetheless, drawing upon it we can, at the very least, make two unambiguous observations regarding kunlun as a term. First, we can note that from its inception kunlun was fundamentally geographical in conception, and centuries before the Common Era the mountains it designated were conceived as numinous but nevertheless tangible. Second, it is clear from our exegesis thus far that ancient Chinese construed kunlun as denoting someplace that was—and eventually some places that were—extremely remote, if not altogether verging on the foreign. We may in fact make the extrapolation from kunlun connoting “remote” to its connoting as “foreign” fairly early in its evolution, for its variable written orthography—with at least six different versions of it appearing in the ancient literature—attests to its highly probable derivation from non-Sinitic antecedents, with the Chinese being consistent with an attempt to approximate a term found in an unrelated language.¹⁴ The ideas of foreignness that kunlun came to evoke are furthermore important because whereas the term never completely lost its root meaning foremost as a toponym, we nonetheless find that, as time progressed, it amassed a plethora of additional associations. Kunlun evolved to denote a widely dispersed variety of different geographical locales, both real and imaginary.¹⁵ In sum, it in fact eventually evolved to bear no more of a restrictive connection with the Kunlun Mountains than it was to forge with a host of other, quite disparate locations.

By far most important for our purposes and most germane to the set of deliberations in which we will henceforth engage about kunlun is a plainly evident lexicographical shift the term underwent with its progression into the Common Era, one whereby its original yet highly amorphous geocentric meaning as a place-name eventually gave way to a very different meaning. This transition is attested to in early-to-middle imperial-period Chinese sources of wide-ranging genres, and being confronted with clear evidence of its occurrence led scholars such as Pelliot to conclude straightforwardly, “Suffice it to say … that the name [kunlun] was applied by the Chinese to black curly-haired (or frizzy-haired) races at least as early as the [fourth century].”¹⁶ Julie Wilensky is equally trenchant in remarking on this striking instance in lexicographical transference whereby this new meaning of the term kunlun displaced and superseded the original when she states, “Sources from the fourth and fifth centuries use the term kunlun to describe people with dark skin.”¹⁷ Thus, despite its substantial vintage as a geographical ascription, by the 300s of the Common Era kunlun had found a new application as the Chinese began to affix the multivalent term not only to people but specifically to all peoples they distinguished from themselves primarily on the basis of their culturally undesirable and stigmatizing dark complexions.

Nevertheless, from our modern-day standpoint, despite its dramatic shift in meaning and perhaps precisely because of its capacious application, kunlun remains—like most past and present terms intended to mark distinctions among human beings exclusively on the basis of skin color—a curiously subjectivist and therefore imprecise term.¹⁸ Even as an emergent term indicative of the observable human trait of comparatively dark skin coloration that we today call “blackness,” on the one hand, kunlun is expressly used in the sources to refer to uncommonly dark-skinned Chinese or commonly dark-skinned neighboring peoples such as Malaysians.¹⁹ On the other hand, kunlun is also used, especially beginning with sources immediately predating those of the Song Dynasty (960–1279), to refer to dark-skinned foreigners of indeterminate extraction, regardless of whether these individuals originally hailed from Southeast Asia or Africa or elsewhere.²⁰ Clearly, in the former instance the application of the term was endogenous—intended to refer to uncommonly dark skin coloration among those who were nonetheless members of the Chinese cultural context—and in the latter instance the application was exogenous—meant to denote the same distinguishing pigmentation in individuals on the margins or from completely outside the Sinitic world order. However, in neither case was the bundle of associations believed to be constituent of the term kunlun statically fixed. Beginning in early times the Chinese have regarded those they designated as kunlun—including those who are culturally indigenous but especially those who are not—with an amorphous mixture of revulsion, fascination, and most of all opaqueness of understanding. To put it another way, in either case, whether attached to the native or to the foreigner, kunlun was at best a neutral if exotic label, and as the negative attributes associated with it began to amass over the centuries, the term became applied only pejoratively, signifying—more typically than not—a hopelessly inferior, limited, and stigmatized condition of being.

The Chinese evidently possessed long-standing knowledge of the existence of the foreign kunlun. Nevertheless, the first wave of these peoples encountered in substantial numbers began verifiably appearing in China proper only as early as sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries.²¹ The sources inform us that these individuals were at first “presented” in association with the normative tribute exchanges in often exotic goods and animals with the Chinese emperors. Only subsequently did they become known to the considerably less exalted but relatively wealthy commoner citizenry, for in every known instance these foreign kunlun had the misfortune of entering China only as slaves. The official Songshi (Song History) is unequivocal on the question. In its sixth chapter on interstate relations with “foreign countries” (waiguo), the Song History describes the slaves attached to an Arab delegation that had arrived at the Chinese court from what is now modern-day Iran in 977: “their servants had deep-set eyes and black bodies. They were called kunlun slaves.”²²

Yet, such concise and clear-cut references notwithstanding, questions about the actual identity of these early black-bodied sojourners in China—as defined by specific place or places of origin and not by any discernible consistency in skin color—have persisted. For legitimate reasons, not the least of these being the gulf of time and cultural distance that separates us from the setting, we are compelled to regard as intractably difficult to resolve these questions of whom the Chinese were referring to when they wrote of these specific kunlun and what the realities of their bondage were. While their exploration confronts us with some daunting challenges, these issues are not insoluble. To prove the point and best facilitate some answers, I have elected to confine the preponderance of my present deliberations temporally—to restrict them to the pivotal era that has become accepted as the middle imperial period or simply the middle period.²³ This Chinese time frame roughly parallels and is mostly coterminous with the medieval period (sixth to sixteenth centuries C.E.) in the West, but in sociocultural, intellectual, and especially commercial terms much of it certainly better corresponds to the Western early modern period (seventeenth to eighteenth centuries C.E.).²⁴

Nonetheless, even while answers are obtainable, exacerbating the challenges is our condition of being so little aided in the endeavor by any paradigm of comparative slaveries. Although it remains imperfect, whether for the middle period or for any subsequent age, our knowledge of the Chinese practice of enslaving other Chinese as well as near-neighboring non-Chinese who were not kunlun, such as Koreans, Thais, and various aboriginal groups, surpasses by far what we have learned to date about the existences and the fates of the numerous foreign slaves from truly remote areas (the so-called guinu, literally “demon” or “devil slaves”) who entered, lived out their days, and died in China.²⁵ We are at a painful loss in any attempt to bring the one system of enslavement into the service of informing us about the other because any linkage between the two seems tenuous at best, if not altogether nonexistent.

We furthermore can reasonably assume, if not completely prove, a stark disparity in numbers, and this factor is also surely one of those contributing to this relative shallowness of our knowledge about the enslavement of distantly foreign slaves in premodern China. While even approximate numbers elude us, we cannot doubt that the Chinese have—over the passage of several millennia—enslaved untold numbers more of their own countrymen than they have foreigners either within or over any specific span of history. This age-old and uninterrupted practice of Chinese endogenous enslavement is a sobering historical reality that should rightly dissuade us from attempting to mount the case for any special perniciousness to exogenous slavery.

Nevertheless, our awareness of the presence of truly foreign and especially ethnically black slaves—that is, those possibly originating from the African continent—on Chinese soil remains undiminished as a somber and cogent fact. For Westerners generally and for citizens of the United States especially, perhaps because of our own lamentable connections to black enslavement, the revelation of the existence of black slaves in eleventh-century China evokes a natural curiosity about the circumstances leading to their arrival there as well as the conditions under which they were held captive, lived out their lives, and died. Our curiosity is fully understandable. After all, no less so than any other aspect of the practice of institutionalized slavery anywhere, the Chinese enslavement of culturally dissimilar peoples, populations unrelated to themselves, despite having heretofore garnered only scant scholarly attention, nonetheless constitutes a vital component in the much larger and almost invariably tragic story of the human trafficking in humans as commodities over the course of history.

Intimations of Blackness and Deficits of Culture

Even as it conforms so fully to a convention that is perhaps ageless, the primacy placed by Chinese on distinctiveness based on geography over that deriving from physical features such as skin color in their earliest accounts of contact with blacks contrasts antithetically from the earliest descriptions offered by Europeans of the classical age in their initial encounters. As Frank Snowden makes clear in his influential work Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks, skin color rose to become immediately forthcoming in the nomenclature with which the ancients of Europe referred to the blacks they met. As he writes, “Among the Greeks and Romans who have provided the fullest descriptions of blacks, the Africans’ color was regarded as their most characteristic and most unusual feature.”²⁶ However, in this very observation we discern an essential variable that possibly aids us enormously in accounting for the dissimilarity in what was considered signature in describing the different populations encountered. In truth, the populations really were different. Whereas the blacks delivered into the Greek and Roman worlds were certifiably Africans—mainly the Nubians and Ethiopians (the latter name derived from the generic Aithiops or Aethiops, coming from the Greek and literally meaning a “burnt-faced person”) of Egypt and northeast Africa’s southern reaches²⁷—those who entered the Chinese world, at least initially, most assuredly were not. Nonetheless, we should not interpret this revelation to mean that skin color simply did not matter to the Chinese as a marker of black otherness. On the contrary, for the Chinese as well as the Greeks and Romans, even while it did not yet apply to the Africans who were still unknown to them, extremely dark or black skin eventually came to serve as an unavoidable and indelible marker of alterity, and we must intuit that it had come to represent such by fairly early times.

Yet, despite its assumed cross-cultural status as an overt indicator of otherness, in stark contrast to what we uncover in the writings of the Greek and Roman forebears of European civilization in the last centuries of the first millennium B.C.E.,²⁸ we find the documentary references in Chinese sources of the same period for black skin coloration as an indicator of racial or ethnic distinctiveness to be, while not wholly absent, nonetheless surprisingly sparse and moreover ambiguous. Indeed, our search for early Chinese literary references of the preunification period (that is, before the year 221 B.C.E.) that specify human blackness tends only to confirm the relative scarcity of any mention of skin color as an elemental descriptive marker of what we today would term ethnic difference, thus bolstering the contention that geography trumped coloration in this distinguishing role for most of China’s premodern history. All the same, even while they are exceedingly rare, these very occasional references nevertheless merit our attention, for they are in many respects cogent and highly provocative.

The first of all references in Chinese traditional literature specifically to a black man (heiren) appears in the well-known philosophical work Mozi, which is now thought to be the product of the indirect as well as direct disciples of the shadowy but possibly historical figure Mo Di (ca. 480–ca. 390 B.C.E.), who, in turn, was better remembered by the same name as the extant book attributed to him.²⁹ Apart from the core first thirty chapters of this seminal text, which can perhaps be ascribed to Mozi’s earliest followers, there exists a separate, later collection of Mohist writings dating from approximately 300 B.C.E. and thus assuredly the work of later generations of adherents.³⁰ A constituent section within these later writings is titled Jingshuo (Explanations of the Canon), and it is devoted exclusively to an exposition of the comparatively minor Chinese philosophical tradition of disputations in logic, with the aim of perfecting a logical method.³¹ The arrangement of the text is in corresponding but separated couplets of canon (jing)—essentially a kind of terse maxim or even catechism—and explanation (shuo)—a succeeding, usually more expansive interpretive gloss.³² One such canon recorded in the text is “If the standard differs, then look into what is appropriate in it.”³³ As the text is now constituted, immediately succeeding this canon, we find the following explanatory gloss: “In picking out this and selecting that, inquire about the reasons and look into what is of appropriateness [in the standard for doing so]. Taking what is black and what is not black about a man to be the extent of [being a] ‘black man (heiren),’ and taking the [acts of] cherishing some men and not cherishing others to be the extent of ‘cherishing men’—which of these [standards] is appropriate?”³⁴

All mystery attending the foregoing passage results precisely from what the later Mohists conceivably meant by the term “black man.” What did this term, which is now very much a “loaded” one for us, mean for its ancient Chinese authors? Exactly what or whom did it denote? Largely stemming from the Western preconceptions that we bring to the analysis of this passage, many of us are likely to assume that this earliest of references to a black man in Chinese sources is not really a reference to skin color at all and that it is in fact a kind of character descriptor, employed in the same manner as the English term “black-hearted” as a designator for the person who by nature exhibits the qualities of a malevolent or evil nature. Explanations of the Canon is not entirely devoid of ethical content. However, with their text being predominantly a treatise on logic, the likelihood that the later Mohists offered their term “black man” chiefly as a morally laden construct is infinitesimally small. For them to have done so would be contrary to the overall intentionality behind the text, in violation of the general spirit that pervades it. Internal evidence also contradicts the moralist interpretation.

By proffering their “black man for philosophical discernment,” the later Mohist writers of the Canon and its Explanations sections of the Mozi most assuredly did intend to emphasize skin color. However, we can also be reasonably certain that, in stark contrast to our latter-day reception of the concept, the later Mohist heiren—far from being living, breathing, and signifying otherness—represented only a heuristic device. Their term “black man,” much like their famously paradoxical “white horse is not a horse” discourse, which they debated in common with their rival nominalist and dialectician counterparts Hui Shi (ca. 380–305 B.C.E.) and Gongsun Long (b. 380 B.C.E.?),³⁵ was little more than a hypothetical abstraction, invented entirely for the purpose of advancing arguments toward a comprehensive theory of language that leads to knowledge. Their main aim was to illustrate their cardinal precept that any given term has the capacity for “picking out” only a limited part of reality.³⁶

Therefore, on the one hand, the black man of these ancient Chinese writings was very much intended as a repository of color. However, on the other hand, whether construed from an ethical or an ethnological standpoint, he was also intended to be rather colorless, for he bore neither the figuratively immoral nor the racial associations for the later Mohists that we automatically attribute to the term today. Moreover, given that they could not claim knowledge of the existence of real black persons—that is, Africans—at such an early stage of history, the later Mohist black man was, at best, native in constitution as well as in conception. Consequently, even if we take the unwarranted step of going to the extreme of granting this novel construct a concretized reality, we can nonetheless be confident that whatever the later Mohists had intended for their black man to represent, he most assuredly was not, in their view, a living and breathing African.

There is an uncanny dimension of surreal serendipity in the later Mohists of China’s preimperial age arbitrarily positing the hypothetical existence of a corresponding segment of humanity that fully existed in reality a half-world away from them. In their time, had they even been aware of it, there would surely be little reason to think that such a correlation would ever matter. However, coincidences between the theorized and the true can be prophetic, and in light of what was to come, we as moderns find that this first Chinese reference to a black man, even as an abstract and invented intimation, can hardly be emptied entirely of its alteric resonance. Inherently, the heiren represented to his Chinese imaginers something quite different in kind from themselves. We will discover that, beginning with this first archaic instance, just as heiren is more than merely suggestive of skin color for us, premodern Chinese too came to regard this particular attributive term as not only denoting the idea of black-skinned but also connoting many additional stigmatizing associations. For these reasons, even upon its first very early emergence, the term heiren prefigured implications for the future reception of black-skinned individuals by Chinese that would be immense, decisive, and inescapable.³⁷

If the first of all Chinese references to a black man or black people is to be found almost incidentally in the somewhat obscure portion of a major philosophical work, then we should perhaps not be surprised to find the second reference surface, with nearly equal happenstance, in one of the most significant mythological writings in the Chinese cultural heritage. Interestingly, this second reference succeeds the first by a maximum of only a couple of centuries, for it appears in the earliest and most celebrated of China’s geocosmological topographies, the anonymously written Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing),³⁸ which was “compiled no later than the beginning of the first century B.C.E..”³⁹ In this protean but peculiar work, which the translator Anne Birrell has described as having “less to do with geography than with cosmology and mythogeography,”⁴⁰ within its eighteenth and final taxonomic book, “The Classic of Regions within the Seas” (“Haineijing”),⁴¹ we find the fleeting mention of the following: “There are also the black people. They have the heads of tigers and the feet of birds. Clutching a snake in either of their two hands, they are constantly chewing on them.”⁴²

Like many of the Chinese writings dating from the beginning of the imperial age or earlier, the anonymously compiled Classic of Mountains and Seas possibly evolved over several centuries before achieving its present form. For this succinct reference to black people and for other reasons we must regard the emergence of this work as a noteworthy development in several ways. As the historian Richard J. Smith points out, as a text the Classic of Mountains and Seas is clearly the product of a wide range of disparate historical, mythological, and divinatory sources, “including, perhaps, Greek, Middle Eastern, and Indian legends.”⁴³ It is also significant to our inquiry because it represents “the earliest known illustrated account of barbarians in China,”⁴⁴ though its status in this regard is problematized by our not knowing whether oldest editions contained illustrations or, if they did, whether the illustrations preceded and were in fact the genesis for the written text we now possess. Recognizing the age-old Chinese penchant for recording the fantastic as well as realistic descriptions of foreign peoples, of greatest importance to our concerns is Smith’s observation that the freakishly “barbarian” peoples cataloged in the pages of the Classic of Mountains and Seas are meant at least occasionally to identify “actual culture groups.”⁴⁵ Indeed, several of the tribes of man-creatures featured in the Classic of Mountains and Seas may well correspond to real peoples, whereas many more may not. The seminal question for our purposes, to be sure, is what to make of the community of semibestial individuals that it only once refers to as black. We perhaps find an answer in a curious adumbration of the instance just discussed.

Remarkably, after its signal appearances in the later Mohist writings of probably the fourth century B.C.E. and the Classic of Mountains and Seas of no earlier than the second century B.C.E., the referencing of a specifically black man or black people occurs nowhere else in the entirety of the Chinese literary corpus until sometime in the early seventeenth century C.E., less than a half-century before the demise of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), an amazingly long period of separation of perhaps as much as two millennia from the time of its first occurrence. Granted, despite the venerable vintage of its locus classicus, nothing precludes the possibility that the term had become employed in oral parlance during the gaping interim period between the time of the later Mohists and the subsequent Classic of Mountains and Seas and that of the Ming Dynasty. However, the total absence of heiren from the intervening written record is conspicuous, and because of the natural proclivity for the spoken language to be reflected in writing at least to some degree by the relatively late date that it at last recurs, this lacuna has the effect of rendering any argument for the widespread currency of the terms “black man” or “black people” quite suspect. Moreover, the fact that heiren was unwritten in any subsequent text for so long into the imperial age is made all the more odd by the new Ming demographic situation, for African blacks, now in the servitude of their European as well as Arab masters, had become known if not altogether highly familiar fixtures of at least the Chinese coastal landscape. Yet, it is precisely against the backdrop of these much changed circumstances that the details of the Ming-period reference to a black man or black people are so unexpected and singularly strange.

Stunningly, the heiren of late traditional times that we encounter in the pages of the Chinese encyclopedia Sancai tuhui (Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers), being a work that the reputable Shanghai scholar and official Wang Qi (fl. 1565–1614) compiled in 1607,⁴⁶ is in every respect no more of an advance beyond pure fantasy than what we encountered in Classic of Mountains and Seas. In fact, considering the very changed times and circumstances during which it surfaces, there is every reason for our regarding this latter-day reference as a regression or at the very least a willful fiction. With this much later reference to a black man, we are confronted with an image that is contrary to our rational expectation of what enhanced knowledge acquired through increased direct exposure to peoples considered black, now even frequently including African slaves, might produce. We receive an implied forewarning of what we are about to receive by dint of the fact that the colophonic description and graphic depiction of the heiren in the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers appear not in the work’s customary “attributes of man” (renshi) division but instead in its “birds and beasts” (niaoshou) division.⁴⁷ Indeed, as we gaze upon the drawing of the Ming-era black man, we are reminded, in an almost verbatim but paradoxically more and also less detailed way, of the severely limited information on the same topic that we could extract from the Classic of Mountains and Seas. This time, however, we are also supplied with an accompanying image (see Figure 1): “Amidst the Southern Sea, upon Mount Bigsnake-follow, there exists the black man. He has the head of a tiger, and in each of his two hands, he grasps a snake. He feeds on them.”⁴⁸

Taken together, the closely related, if not fully identical, examples culled from the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers demonstrate the astounding consistency with which an identical term can be received, understood, and interpreted across time. We find that in two vastly different historical contexts separated by nearly twenty centuries little has changed. On the one hand, the earliest black man reference in the corpus of the later Mohists establishes the nomenclature but most assuredly does not establish the conceptualization for those found in either of the later, more encyclopedic texts.⁴⁹ On the other hand, we can ironically observe that as a term, heiren is nonetheless relied upon in all three textual contexts to summon forth mentally entities that we today classify as purely imaginary. For its premodern Chinese imaginers, however, heiren was employed precisely as a kind of conjuring device, an evocative catalyst that was used to bring to mind and signify something believed to exist somewhere on the most remote periphery of civilization, even if it had not necessarily been personally encountered and thereby verified as existing in nature.

Figure 1. Black man in Wang Qi, ed., Sancai tuhui [Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers], vol. 6. (1607; repr., Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1970), 2256. For those seeking it in a customary Chinese-bound edition of Sancai tuhui, this image is contained in the fourth of the six chapters of the division devoted to fauna, the thirty-third (Chinese recto but Western verso) page.

Yet, all the same, there is also a defining difference among the three examples that is altogether crucial. Whereas we must accept the later Mohist black man of the preimperial age as benign and hardly more than a hypothetical cipher, we can only receive the black man or black people of the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers as a fanciful and baleful specter. In these latter instances, especially when confronted with any of the accompanying pictorial representations that have been preserved, we struggle to deny that it is an image imbued with darkly malignant otherness. Furthermore, although it is delineated with the utmost concision (neither mentioning nor conferring a depiction that includes “the feet of birds” of the earlier version—perhaps a serious indication of an evolutionary shift in perspective?), the discourse of estrangement furnished by Wang Qi in the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers speaks proverbial volumes. Conforming as it does to the long-established Chinese convention of estrangement of the nonnative earlier discussed above, this caption, to be sure, defines the heiren in terms of his geographical remoteness (“Amidst the Southern Sea, upon Mount Bigsnake-follow”). Moreover, also in conformance to custom, it emphasizes his cultural deprivation (“and in each of his two hands, he grasps a snake. He feeds on them.”).

Most relevantly, even while he clearly represents a vestigial carryover from a much earlier age, the bizarre encyclopedic black man of the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers reveals no likelihood that the Chinese of the late Ming period either identified or associated the term heiren with any of the populations of humans with whom they were increasingly coming into contact—humans whom they structurally, if not nominally, nonetheless, regarded as black-skinned. We therefore must seriously doubt that the Chinese of the late Ming period were inclined to think of their black man as a man at all in the normative sense of the word. The Sinologist Roel Sterckx has commented on the tendency over the ages for Chinese to “portray barbarians who shared the habitats of the exotic bestiaries in the periphery of the Chinese cultural epicenter as having the inner disposition of animals.”⁵⁰ However, surely, if we are to judge anything from the likeness of him depicted in the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers, the Ming black man was outwardly at least as much animal as he was human, perhaps signifying his condition of being even further removed well beyond the periphery of that epicenter. Especially given the historical lateness of the context and the concomitantly heightened knowledge of actual black humans on the part of Chinese that we should expect, the Ming black man, far more so than his prototype of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, is truly more it than he, and we can readily substitute that pronoun throughout the description to profoundly revealing effect. Our doing so presents us with a mental image that was every bit as dehumanizing in the late traditional Chinese context as it remains in our contemporary Western one: “Amidst the Southern Sea, upon Mount Bigsnake-follow, there exists the black man. It has the head of a tiger, and in each of its two hands, it grasps a snake. It feeds on them.” Through our substitution of the pronoun it, we recover historically a black man that was dramatically closer to the premodern Chinese perceived reality, one that was not only estranged from the Chinese in particular by geography and culture but also in every respect irredeemably separated from overall humanity in general.

Preconditioned for Bondage

Thus, we can find no extant Chinese literary evidence that, prior to modern times, substantiates whether the term heiren was ever used to refer directly to black humans, not to mention whether it was reserved expressly to be applied to Africans. Nevertheless, well before the beginning of the seventeenth century the presumed fusion between blackness of skin and the grave condition of being incapable of achieving any level of cultural attainment had already become firmly fixed in Chinese consciousness. Similarly, equally fused and entrenched in the Chinese mind had become the connection between blackness and innate, if not inveterate, savagery. Interestingly, whether in the example in the Classic of Mountains and Seas or that in the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers, one finds that actual skin coloration, while ascribed nominally and implied by context, goes unexplored. In neither case can we accept the tiger’s head of the heiren as having absolutely no basis of inspiration. A tiger’s head on an otherwise humanlike body is by any standard as fearsome a symbol of ferocity as need be imagined, much less encountered. Moreover, in reality, even if heiren was not the name by which they were contemporarily called, black-skinned humans—that is, the kunlun—must have struck the still relatively few Chinese of late traditional times who actually encountered them as not only alien but also intimidating and, much like the tiger, emblematic of bellicosity.⁵¹

An air of menace is integral to a substantial number of the accounts of contact between the Chinese and the succession of peoples they collectively called kunlun. Sometimes merely undercurrent and other times overt, dread of the kunlun in fact constitutes a kind of thematic thread coursing throughout most reports. Fear on the part of the Chinese, even if latent, often beset their interactions with the kunlun, and extant documentary records confirm this fact with enough frequency to make it difficult to ignore. From these sources we learn that the quality of Chinese-kunlun relations ranged across the entire spectrum of interactive possibilities, from the cooperative to the merely fractious to the foreboding. Our earliest information regarding the last category of engagement comes from a striking entry, already cited in the introduction, first officially preserved in the Old Tang History and dated as having occurred in 684 C.E.⁵² It involves the previously described death in that year of the Guangzhou governor Lu Yuanrui, who evidently was a man so lightly regarded both in his time and later that even his death is prosaically first recorded not independently but instead in the biography of the successor to his post.⁵³ From this terse and unadorned entry we learn that “The territories of Guangzhou border the Southern Sea. Every year, the kunlun merchants arrive in [their] ships, laden with valuable goods to trade with the Chinese. The previous governor tried to cheat them out of their goods, so a kunlun had come forth with a concealed knife and killed him.”⁵⁴

The blandness of description in this rendition of the occurrence notwithstanding, in short order Lu Yuanrui’s murder became highly sensationalized. In addition, despite the passage of several centuries, his ignominious end still remained conspicuous enough to be recorded again in the celebrated Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror Aiding Government) of Sima Guang (1019–86), which was surely the preeminent historical work produced during the Song Dynasty.⁵⁵ Sima’s preservation of this same episode in one of the most renowned of China’s privately written histories some four hundred years after it had transpired attests to its lingering resonance as a source of morbidly salacious fascination. His more embellished rendering of the event also clues us to its symbolic significance. Most of all, we are meant to remember Lu Yuanrui for the manner of his death—that is, at whose hands it occurred—as well as for the irresolution of its disposition:

In the autumn, on wuwu (mouwu) of the seventh month [Western date: 8 September], the governor of Guangzhou, Lu Yuanrui, was killed by a kunlun. Yuanrui was stupid and cowardly, and his subordinates were unrestrained and devious. Whenever merchant ships would arrive, his subordinates would ceaselessly seek through extortion to divert profits for themselves, causing the merchant barbarians to complain to Yuanrui. Yuanrui [finally] sought to address the situation by calling for cangues, wishing to have [one group of foreign merchants] bound as punishment for their complaints.

[Lu Yuanrui’s actions] enraged this group of barbarians, such that there was a kunlun among them who entered directly into Yuanrui’s offices, bearing a sword that he concealed in his sleeves. He then killed Yuanrui as well as more than ten of the people surrounding him and fled. No one [at the scene] dared to approach the kunlun [to prevent his escape]. The murderer boarded a ship and set to sea; the ship was pursued but could not be overtaken.⁵⁶

The murder of Lu Yuanrui proves in many respects to be a watershed. From the two foregoing accounts in succession of the death of the ill-fated extortionist Guangzhou governor, we can extract a wealth of information about the nature and tenor of Chinese-kunlun intercourse during the fatefully momentous transition from Tang to Song times. Some of this information we glean is factual, but a good deal of it is also dispositional. Drawing from among the factual elements, we learn that in their earliest designation the kunlun were probably of Malay ethnicity, or to frame the matter conversely, that they were almost assuredly not Africans. Confirmation comes from the fact that the Chinese had since at least the beginning of the seventh century C.E. engaged in regular and thriving maritime trade along the South China Sea coast with the people they called kunlun. The expansion of trade precipitated by the removal of such rapacious officials as Lu Yuanrui indeed emboldened the kunlun and their Javanese neighbors to such an extent that they undertook raids of aggrandizement in 767 as far afield as the northern coastline of Vietnam, all for the purpose of, as the modern scholar of the Chinese Southern Sea (Nanyang) diaspora Wang Gungwu observes, establishing their “commercial supremacy” over the region.⁵⁷

Additional corroboration of the highly probable Malay identity of the original kunlun and the location of their domain within greater Malaysia comes from the fact that a commentarial note dating from the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368), appended to the account in the Comprehensive Mirror Aiding Government by its editor Hu Sanxing (1230–1302), definitively informs us of the location of Kunlunguo, the fabled “kingdom of Kunlun,” or perhaps better put, it supplies us with some highly impressionistic directions for how to get there. We are informed: “The kingdom of Kunlun is located to the south of Linyi (Champa); [to travel there] one goes beyond Jiaozhi (Tonkin, present-day Hanoi) by sea for more than three hundred days. Customarily, in writing, Kunlun is the same [place] as Poluomen [Brahman?] (formerly constituting the entirety of the west coast of India, from Kulam in the south to the mouth of the Indus River in the north).”⁵⁸ A Song History entry of approximately the same vintage rather generically replicates at least Hu Sanxing’s approach to, if not altogether his specific landmarks for, finding the land called Kunlun by utilizing instead the kingdom of Shepoguo (Java) as the primary reference point: “Java is located in the Southern Sea. One arrives in this country from the east by means of a month at sea. Then, with a half-month’s rowing, one arrives at Kunlunguo.”⁵⁹

Clearly there seems to be no premium placed on the accuracy of these “directions,” even if we are inclined to consider them as such, and it is difficult to discern which one of the two sets is more suspect. Were one to follow, for instance, strictly the latter set, then—quite implausibly—as the scholar Zhang Xinglang (also Chang Hsing-lang) (1888–1951)—who will loom as a large presence in our subsequent deliberations—observed, Kunlunguo “must be none other than Thailand (Xianluoguo).”⁶⁰ Such improbabilities notwithstanding, from such “directions” as these provided in the Yuan sources we can at the very least discern that the Chinese of the Tang and Song eras had regarded the inhabitants of Kunlun with whom they periodically interacted and interchanged through mercantile activity as hailing from some generalized region far to the south but also to the west—that is, from some vaguely defined place remote from China and not altogether lacking in proximity to points much further west, including, incidentally, the eastern coast of Africa.

The historian Feng Chengjun (1885–1946), writing nearly seven centuries later in his milestone Zhongguo Nanyang jiaotong shi (History of Chinese Southern Sea Transit), offers us only slightly more specific parameters than does Hu Sanxing, stating: “Since ancient days, the kingdom of Kunlun has been imprecisely designated as a single zone, defined by the various countries extending to Annam (Zhancheng) in the north, to Java (Zhuawa) in the south, to Malaysia (Malaibandao) in the west, to Borneo (Poluozhou) in the east. At its severe extreme, it extends even to the east coast of Africa. We can think of all of this area as incorporating the territory of Kunlun.”⁶¹ On the basis of its sweepingly immense area, Feng Chengjun’s “Kunlun” is defined only loosely, to be sure. However, the expansive boundaries that Feng offers adumbrate the point earlier made that we should always be prepared to think of kunlun as geographically denoting a potential panoply of locations, ranging from its namesake range of mountains in Tibet to a substantial portion of an entire oceanic zone (see Map 1).⁶² Moreover, we can also intuit from Feng’s description that there may well have been, over the course of history, numerous “kingdoms” of Kunlun, with the precise location having been largely dependent on the time period of the reference. Such an understanding provides us with ample justification for believing that although the kingdom of Kunlun specifically referred to by commentators on the Comprehensive Mirror Aiding Government such as Hu Sanxing was no longer so near at hand as the landlocked mountains of Tibet, neither was it so distant from China proper as is the East African coast. This reasoning all the more reinforces rather soundly the view that the peoples to whom the Chinese of the Tang and Song periods initially affixed the appellation kunlun were more or less, especially at the farthest western extremes, exclusively Malaysians.

Map 1. The Nanhai region, ca. 1225. Adapted from Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, trs., Chau Ju-kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chï (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1911).

Moreover, we are fortunately not solely dependent on Hu Sanxing’s particular notation for directions to the kingdom of Kunlun, which was sometimes in Song-period texts alternatively called Kunlunshan—with the suffix shan, in instances such as this one, somewhat counterintuitively denoting an “island” rather than its more standard translation as “mountain.” Writing perhaps a century earlier than Hu but only a half-century later than Sima, Zhao Rugua (1170–1231), in his Zhufan zhi (Description of Foreign Peoples), remarks succinctly that by “sailing the sea half a month [to the north of Shepo], one arrives at the kingdom of Kunlun.”⁶³ Although we need not dismiss the vague directions of Hu Sanxing outright, certain realities should incline us to give due credence to those supplied by Zhao Rugua. The genealogical records of the Song History do inform us of Zhao Rugua’s descent from a collateral branch of the dynastic imperial clan.⁶⁴ However, of all his contemporaries, only the famous Song-period bibliographer Chen Zhensun (fl. 1211–49) conveys anything to us about Zhao Rugua’s life, and Chen indeed informs us of very little, stating only that when he “served as a supervisor of maritime trade in Fujian, Zhao Rugua recorded [names and descriptions of] the various foreign countries and the commodities issuing forth from them.”⁶⁵ Yet, from this terse entry on the noteworthy Zhao family library contained in his important Zhizhai shulu jieti (Catalog of Books with Explanatory Notices of the Zhi Studio), we can further deduce that Zhao Rugua, in his official capacity as a maritime trade commissioner (shibo shi)⁶⁶ at the major port of Quanzhou, must assuredly have had frequent interaction with foreign as well as Chinese traders. Therefore, we can deem much of the information he provides in his book on such far-flung locations as Ceylon (Xilan) or modern Sri Lanka, Malabar (Nanpi), the Somali coast (Zhongli), Misr or Egypt (Wusili), and Sicily (Sijialiye) to have come to him through direct oral transmission.

In appraising the overall value of the work as a primary source, the anthropologist William Lessa was compelled to comment that Zhao Rugua’s Description of Foreign Peoples “is so specific and detailed as to cause us to realize the extent of intercourse there was between China and the outside maritime world.”⁶⁷ The historian John Chaffee is even more emphatic in his appraisal, calling Zhao’s work “a uniquely important account of the Asian, African, and even Mediterranean maritime world as it was known to the Chinese in the thirteenth century, describing, first, countries and cultures, and second, the varieties of goods imported into China.”⁶⁸ Other extant texts, including the somewhat earlier Guihai yuheng zhi (Description of Mountains and Forests of the Region of the Southern Sea) written by Fan Chengda (1126–93) in 1175 and Lingwai daida (Notes on Lands beyond the Mountains) written by Zhou Qufei (j.s. 1163) in 1178, with varying degrees of detail catalog the extensive maritime world of late or Southern Song (1127–1279) times and refer especially to the southernmost reaches of the empire as well as various of the now indeterminate locales situated in the seas south of the Chinese mainland.⁶⁹ However, in the estimations of later traditional Chinese as well as contemporary Western scholars, upon its completion in 1226 Zhao Rugua’s Description of Foreign Peoples has remained unsurpassed, leading Chaffee to conclude summarily that it has “expanded the Chinese literati’s knowledge of foreign places and objects and has been an invaluable text for the history of maritime commerce ever since.”⁷⁰

Just as important to us as the sources citing Kunlun and the location of this remote place is what it meant as an idea—that is, what by Tang and certainly Song times it had come to signify in the minds of its not-remote-enough Chinese observers. Thus, the hazy geographical coordinates provided notwithstanding, we must return to the above accounts of the vicious murder of the ethnic Han official Lu Yuanrui and his immediate entourage at the hands of a lone kunlun assailant for answers. They reveal information of greater meaning than the purely factual as they combine to contribute amply to our understanding of the Chinese premodern dispositional perspective toward the kunlun. From them we can be certain that those Chinese engaged in these early centuries of interaction with the kunlun unquestionably regarded them warily and with a conterminous mixture of condescension and trepidation, scorn and fear, no matter what they construed their majority nationality or ethnic composition to have been. Between the first notices on Lu Yuanrui’s murder in the late seventh century and that of its detailed summation by Sima Guang for all posterity at the end of the eleventh, additional source material of the most interesting kind on the kunlun was contributed to the intervening historical record by various individuals. Nevertheless, this material beclouds as well as enlightens, for in its tone it tends to reinforce long-established ideas about the perceived savagery prevailing among the kunlun and mostly thereby only reifies the threat posed to Chinese by them. As the famed Buddhist lexicographer Huilin (737–820), for example, observes in his expansive Yiqiejing yinyi (Pronunciations and Definitions for All the Scriptures), employing a variant form of the name generally assigned to them and equating it with the most generalized Chinese term for barbarian, “They are at times in vernacular speech also called gulun. They are the barbarous peoples (yiren) of the great and small islands of the Southern Sea.”⁷¹

Yet, for all they do confirm about what we earlier could only hypothesize or surmise, these tandem accounts of the death of Lu Yuanrui are also keenly deserving of our interest for what they fail to reveal on the matter that is of greatest pertinence to our present deliberations. Whereas much in them is obviously directed at conjuring up utter and unreserved disdain for the kunlun, in neither account is there any mention of skin color. On the one hand, the skin coloration—the unalterable darkness or blackness—of any man of that time who, like the murderous assassin of Lu Yuanrui and his entourage, was described as kunlun might very well have been implicitly understood, and thus it simply dictated no explicit comment. On the other hand, however, it is also possible that, at least inasmuch as is reflected especially in the official and quasi-official reports, the inveterate foreignness of the culprit loomed larger in premodern Chinese consciousness than such a seemingly distinctive aspect of his appearance as color would for us today. As of old, the distinctiveness of foreignness may well have simply trumped that of appearance in these particular accounts. Yet, we need not look far for countervailing evidence, accounts of the kunlun that, in the transitional centuries of increasing contact between Tang and Song, place their skin color and all of its threatening associations on display. For proof we need but return to the remainder of Huilin’s observations:

Being extremely black, they bare their naked frames. They are capable of taming and cowing ferocious beasts, rhinoceroses, elephants, and the like. There are many races and varieties of them, and thus there are the Sengqi, the Tumi, the Gutang, the Gemie (Khmer), and such. All are base and lowly peoples. Propriety and rightness are absent from their domains. They rob and steal for a living, and they delight in chewing up and devouring humans, just like luocha (rakshasas) or evil ghosts. Being different from those spoken by the various [other] foreigners, the languages that these peoples speak are perverse. They excel at entering the water, for they can remain there for the entire day and not perish.⁷²

Having been primarily a linguist, Huilin’s ostensible interests would have concentrated on the place of the kunlun in the Chinese lexicon, and in fact, the title of his entry in his important early dictionary is precisely that—“Kunlun Speech” (kunlun yu). This focus should not surprise us, for anciently as well as presently dissimilarity in language, particularly the perceived degree of unintelligibility in comparison with one’s own, has served as one of the cardinal demarcating factors between the civilized and the uncivilized. Moreover, linguistic discordance, bundled with certain other specific factors, has assuredly served with particular tenacity as a marker of difference in China. As the historian and philologist Mu-chou Poo has observed, and as will be subsequently shown, “Language and lifestyle, including dietary habits and dress, seem to be the major differences that caught the attention of people when they thought about the cultural differences between Chinese and barbarians.”⁷³

The extent of Huilin’s direct exposure to the various varieties of kunlun he describes remains an open question, and his description of these “barbarous peoples” in what would appear to be their native habitat, while probably something less than a total fabrication, is almost certainly not a firsthand account. Nevertheless, through it Huilin clearly exceeds well beyond the initially circumscribed concern with language to touch upon all of the criteria that Mu-chou Poo tenders as standard demarcators of difference in the Chinese context, and we can therefore take his effort as actually representing the first steps taken toward the construction of ethnography. Obviously, by our modern standards, Huilin’s protoethnography of the kunlun is overtly crude and prejudicial. Nonetheless, we can little dispute its consonance with what likely were the prevailing attitudes of his times. In other words, we can hardly expect him to offer an account of the kunlun that differed radically from what his potential audience wanted to read. Ironically, the early Tang period is renowned for what scholars have long contended was a highly cosmopolitan outlook, one that incorporated with relative tolerance all varieties of peoples. However, Huilin’s words expose us to the limits of this supposed tolerant outlook. Clearly, the accommodating disposition of the early Tang was reserved only for those peoples whom the Chinese perceived as possessing at least a semblance of culture; it was never meant to extend to those peculiar classes of outlanders whom they regarded as savage, cannibalistic, or black.

In keeping with the spirit of ethnography as a genre, through Huilin’s brief entry we can discern much more about how the Chinese actually tended to regard the kunlun than how they defined them. We learn that at least some Chinese recognized different groups or “races” of kunlun, a fact that, given the Chinese emphasis on the geographical basis for determining otherness, implies they were understood neither as all occupying nor necessarily as all originating from the same locale. Even while they are described as “base and lowly peoples,” there is no denying the undercurrent of dread in Huilin’s comments, which seems precipitated by the mere black and exposed physical presence of the kunlun and which was no doubt compounded for his contemporary readers by his chilling reference to them as “delight[ing] in chewing up and devouring humans, just like luocha (rakshasas) or evil ghosts.” We do discover that the Chinese doubtless found traits in the kunlun that they could admire or, perhaps better put, marvel at in a grotesque sort of way; these include their reputed capabilities for rendering wild animals docile and their nearly fishlike natural aquatic abilities. Most of all, though, Huilin’s description of the various breeds of kunlun is tempered by disgust. Even if we deem his to be among the more generous descriptions (which for that time it was), we can neither overlook nor diminish his general tone of revulsion at the barbaric customs of the kunlun, which—from a Chinese standpoint—were not even deserving to be designated as customs. We can only conclude that Huilin, perforce, like countless numbers of Chinese before and after him, felt he had no choice but to consign the kunlun to the lowest possible rung of the ladder of humanity. The complex of dread and repulsion that Huilin felt at the very idea of being in their presence, which stemmed not least from their blackness—after all, the first attribute to which he refers—must have left him no other option.

In the premodern world of which Tang China was a part, one universally recognized solution to the threat posed by confrontation with the other was the submission to higher authority yielded by the imposition of enslavement. From the most ancient times an acceptable response to the threat posed by the other has been to subdue him. As Frank Dikötter has astutely theorized, that critical discriminatory sequence of reasoning whereby black becomes equated with slave was arrived at fairly early in Chinese history, which might well have been exceptional in its rapidity because, in accounting for the European historical case, we encounter at least one surprising counterexplanation for the delayed occurrence of this equation that we assume to be universal.⁷⁴ Deducing exactly why Chinese of the premodern period might have come to conflate blackness so intimately with slavery and why they did it so early is not difficult. For the Chinese, enslavement was, after all, a less costly means of dealing with the dark outliers of their known universe, with whom—if Huilin’s remarks are representative—they recognized no shared ethnic traits, than by perpetual warfare waged against them. Enslavement was also preferable and more cost-effective than war because the Chinese themselves were not fated ultimately to be the principal slavers. By and certainly after the eighth century C.E., when the other as African became perhaps as prominent as the enslaved Melakan or Khmer, the chore of actually procuring most of those slaves was primarily left to the Arabs. There were also simply fewer impediments and hazards—legal, moral, and otherwise—involved in enslaving foreigners of any type, not to mention kunlun, than in enslaving other Chinese. Indeed, in many Chinese minds of that time the attractions of enslavement for dealing with either the authentically or the seemingly obstreperous foreigner cannot be overstressed, and it is interesting and ironical to note that its tangible trappings of physical restraint had been resorted to even by the unfortunate governor Lu Yuanrui. We can little doubt that he had regarded shackling the unruly foreign merchants on his watch as the best and safest answer to his developing problem. Yet, we can also note that it was his own misstep in aggression, his fatal threat to bind his threatening guests, that sealed his doom more than anything else he said or did.

If the foregoing rationales represent primarily reasons of expedience, then—before moving forward with the narrative—we should at last ponder that impetus behind the Chinese enslavement of the kunlun that arguably surpasses all others in importance. Especially in relation to the menacing kunlun, the Chinese came to favor enslavement such that it became a predilection, and its status as an almost instinctual response intended to mitigate danger led to its perpetuation. From ancient times, for the Chinese as well as for other peoples similarly positioned in relation to the other, enslavement was doubtless construed as the optimal means of negotiating and navigating spatial coexistence with those thought not to be of one’s kind. It was also a way of restoring cosmic order and balance in the Chinese confrontation with an encroaching, malignant force—that is, by relegation, regulating the other, a being who was normally held in check and at bay by the remove of physical distance. In this connection, a clause excerpted from Huilin’s “ethnography” is quite suggestive; he refers to the capacity of the kunlun for “taming and cowing ferocious beasts, rhinoceroses, elephants, and the like.” Conversely, such “taming and cowing” are precisely what the Chinese sought to visit upon the kunlun. In the broadest sense, these motives were compatible with the Chinese pattern of managing dealings not just with the kunlun but with all variants of the other, for if the foreigner, the stranger (interestingly, in middle literary Chinese often the identical term, keren, can also mean “guest”), could not be banished to or contained at a greater distance, then he must be controlled. Enslavement is, of course, the ultimate controlling device.

The perceptible cultural shortcomings that all kunlun, regardless of breed, exhibited had the effect only of encouraging Chinese designs on their enslavement and reinforcing the moral legitimacy of the practice as beneficial to the enslaved, much in the same way that the “white man’s burden” premise justified the most egregious imperialist actions whereby Victorian Britons subjugated millions of people of color around the globe in the nineteenth century. The kunlun’s cultural deficiencies, in other words, made him ripe for being dominated by those who were not deficient, and this domination was seen as fitting. To be sure, from a realistic perspective, the Chinese did probably realize that there must have been gradations of acculturation obtaining among the varieties of kunlun they encountered. However, at the root of their prejudices was the familiar stereotyping that diminishes distinctions and accentuates commonalities—the same seemingly eradicable dynamic that has always fueled antagonism and hatred toward the other. Chinese, in sum, saw the chasm of culture between themselves and any of the kunlun as so unfathomable as to permit these disparities among the latter always to be disregarded. Beholding only cultural vacuity when they gazed upon the primitive kunlun, the Chinese thus judged them exclusively by the physical denominator they had in common while ignoring the occasional differences, such as wavy versus curly or kinky hair. This common physical denominator, shared to one degree or another by all, was their relative blackness.

Chinese successes over time in enslaving the kunlun seem not to have relaxed the compulsion for doing so. During the first half of the sixteenth century Chinese merchants involved in trade with the newest foreigners—by this time Europeans such as the Portuguese and the Spanish—employed the kunlun of Melaka not only as laborers but also on occasion as go-between interpreters. Moreover, for their part, by the latter half of the same century, when they began gradually but more copiously to trickle into the empire, China’s European visitors were hardly remiss in emulating the willful pattern of subjugation of their hosts. We may take as a prime example the Italian Matteo Ricci (1552–1610),⁷⁵ the first and greatest of the Jesuit fathers in China. In the years before acquiring his legendary mastery of Chinese, Ricci relied on native blacks (Malays?) as interpreters and imported blacks (Africans?) as servants—that is, before he was eventually compelled to change over to Chinese for both purposes upon learning and coming to appreciate that, as the historian Jonathan Spence relates it, “these blacks frightened the Chinese.”⁷⁶ This observation by Spence is doubly revealing. On the one hand, it is reflective of the fact that blacks—understood by our definition as probably Malays—were commonplace enough throughout late sixteenth-century Chinese society as to provoke little comment in the indigenous literature. However, on the other hand, it reflects the fact that there must also simultaneously have existed blacks of African extraction in China, for why else would the natives be “frightened” by them? In other words, the only logical way of explaining the fear evoked in the hearts of Ricci’s Chinese contacts at the sight of peoples by this point ostensibly so familiar is to acknowledge that they were actually not that familiar, not at all kunlun of some customary stock but instead those who were just as much products of imagination as they were of reality.

Such, then, were the meager limits to which the Chinese perception of blacks had, by the end of the premodern era, progressed. In the end, one can justifiably quibble with whether, in the Chinese context, blackness, as Dikötter claims, “had always been a symbolic expression for slavery.”⁷⁷ After all, other scholars, such as Raymond Dawson, have argued that chief among the Chinese distinguishing criteria between civilization and barbarism was neither social nor political organization, neither religion nor race, but instead cultural attainment.⁷⁸ However, this argument is most compelling only when applied to the dealings of the Chinese with peoples, such as even the customary kunlun of probable Malay ethnicity, whose racial constitutions they perceived as not differing altogether drastically from their own, and it becomes far less compelling when we extend it to what would be the future encounters between Chinese and Africans. Yet, these contentions notwithstanding, the fact remains that by the time the Chinese had genuinely established contact with and developed a true cognizance of the peoples of Africa, the “symbolic expression” to which Dikötter refers, whereby they had come to equate blackness fully and categorically with slavery, had already been well in place and robustly intact for a period of considerable duration. Sadly, it would endure for centuries, and its legacy lingers with us even now.