The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt
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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