The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt
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[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.”6 The assailant was not content simply to cut Lu Yuanrui down on the spot. Wielding his knife or perhaps knives (the original Chinese is actually unclear), he also, in what must have been a horrifically savage bloodletting, dispatched a dozen or possibly more members of the governor’s immediate entourage. Moreover, adding insult to the considerable injury, by effectively evading all pursuers and avoiding capture, the culprit managed to put out to sea and thus escape justice. Now as well as then the deed itself was grave enough. However, the matter was made all the more deplorable by the single individualized reference to the perpetrator as a kunlun, a term essential to our present purposes because it was the first certifiable signifier to emerge in China for identifying a kind of person considered by Chinese standards to be utterly unlike themselves—that is, someone construed by premodern Chinese to evince the characteristics of being ethnically black.7
In Chapter 1 we will revisit the violent death of Lu Yuanrui and deliberate in still greater detail than we have thus far on all that is implied by his manner of death. A reason as sound as any for focusing on this episode at this early juncture is its prime functionality as an initial signpost for all our further deliberations on premodern China’s relationship to its blacks. Whereas Lu the man is easy enough for us to relegate to obscurity, we will find that the circumstances of his death are not, and they will collectively come to serve as well as any compass to point us in the direction of the crucial questions that will most preoccupy us. Indeed, it is the reality of his death at the hands of some variety of kunlun that catapults us forward into engagement with the intermeshing themes that dominate the discourse entailed over the remainder of this book. In sum, the importance of the recording of Lu Yuanrui’s murder lies principally in the fact that it comprises the earliest and least equivocal historical documentation we now have of the undercurrent tensions and occasional outright enmity that had, by the ninth century if not well before then, evolved to become a fixture of Chinese-kunlun relations.
The specific matter of Lu Yuanrui is also of supreme value to us at this stage for the seminal kinds of questions it evokes. Not the least weighty but certainly among the more expected questions for us to ask are, who were the kunlun and, since they were no more imaginary than the merchants who seasonally ported at Guangzhou and on one infamously unfortunate occasion claimed the lives of Lu Yuanrui and a good number of his subordinates, from where did they come? We shall discover that, much like these queries, the answer to each question is locked in interdependency because we will learn that over several centuries the Chinese of premodern times affixed the appellation kunlun to an expanding array of peoples, most of whom by our contemporary standards should have represented quite distinct nationalities and ethnicities to them. Moreover, and somewhat counterintuitively, we will witness how this succession of peoples to which the designation kunlun was applied actually underwent expansion even as Chinese knowledge of the greater world commensurately increased. Increased geographical exploration, initially to the south but later in the westward direction, and greater exposure to peoples not previously encountered had the effect of contributing to a swelling rather than a diminution of those included under the kunlun rubric. We will come to regard the still larger questions elicited by such discoveries as this one as contributing immeasurably to the arrestingly engrossing quality of our inquiry.
By the time of Lu Yuanrui’s murder, the Chinese had already experienced perhaps a half-millennium of contact with an expanding succession of peoples whom they designated as kunlun. However, even if it was sustained, as the case of the use of Guangzhou as a port of call certainly implies, we should not assume that contact over the centuries had necessarily become generally more cooperative or felicitous. Familiarity need not assure contempt, but neither is there sufficient reason for our believing that Tang Chinese perspectives on the peoples they sometimes indiscriminately called kunlun had advanced greatly beyond their initial exposure to them in the early centuries of the Common Era. Despite their vaunted reputation for cosmopolitanism, the Chinese of Tang times were also heirs in large degrees to the far less pluralistic ages that had preceded them. Just as we today are inclined to wonder whether life “as we know it” abounds on some other planet, Chinese of the first centuries C.E., like peoples of ancient times elsewhere who were often cut off from all but incidental and near-miraculous contact with those geographically remote from themselves, doubtless reflected on the relative similarity or dissimilarity to themselves of the few alien peoples they chanced to encounter. Often even the fundamental humanness of foreigners was debated, for it was considered far from a certainty.
The topic under scrutiny is admittedly exotic, even for other sinological specialists. However, the approach adopted in the present book is strictly pedestrian. Hence, herein there are no grand explanations of the vast history of cross-cultural human experience; as I have already intimated, I have sought merely to provide answers to a provocative yet quite strictly circumscribed set of questions. Foremost among these questions of concern is, to the best that we can determine, precisely when did individuals of Chinese ethnicity, by dint of contact stemming from actual sightings and interaction, first become aware and therefore knowledgeable of individuals whom they, just as we are disposed to do today, considered black? In other words, when exactly did peoples of or descended from African ancestry first enter upon the consciousness of the people of China? What historical event or series of events first provided the Chinese with palpable evidence of the existence of black peoples, and how was this evidence received and internalized?
This task of detecting how or under what circumstances Chinese first became aware of blacks is just as challenging as ascertaining when such awareness arose. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that obtaining tenable answers to the former question has the potential for being substantially more rewarding than any answer to the latter. Any success in answering with any thoroughness how such a consciousness arose undeniably makes a profoundly more valuable contribution to the early history of cross-cultural intercourse than just answering when. This opinion has served as the motive impetus behind my writing this book.
However, ultimately our capacity for determining the how as well as the when in the dawning of Chinese cognizance of peoples whom they perceived as black goes well beyond any self-seeking aggrandizement of our own interest and knowledge, for it can result only in a narrative with the widest and most fascinating of historical implications. Simply in the telling we should expect this story of the first face-to-face contact between Chinese and blacks to illuminate, even if only partially and somewhat incompletely, all comparable histories of meetings between members of two vastly culturally dissimilar peoples—peoples without confirmed previous exposure to each other. Thus, such a story should also be historically edifying because it would enrich our overall understanding of the dynamics at work in the initial interactions between previously unexposed cultures at all prior and subsequent stages in world history.
The version of the story of earliest detectable Chinese-black contact furnished here presents all of these potentialities. Yet, I have become convinced that even to imply that it is a self-contained “story” is itself a distortion. As is herein revealed, Lu Yuanrui’s sensationalistic murder notwithstanding, there never was any single watershed occasion of interaction between Chinese and blacks. Instead, what we confront is a protracted sequence divisible into several clusters of salient events, with each spaced discretely and discontinuously across premodern times; thus, the tale to be told—the saga, for lack of a better term—is truly episodic. By as late as the turn of the sixteenth century of our Common Era, interaction between blacks and Chinese had already infrequently occurred for more than a millennium before direct and regular Sino-European contact began. We should not be surprised that those occasional interactions were characterized qualitatively by the complete spectrum of human emotions, ranging—at different times and by turns—from mutual awe to mutual indifference to mutual disgust.
Before beginning in earnest, we should recognize that there are three other prominent dimensions of the saga of premodern Chinese-black interaction that we will profit from bearing constantly in mind. Regardless of whether we approach the story as historian specialists