The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt
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will assist us immeasurably by functioning as kinds of cautionary intellectual beacons. Without heeding the informing light cast by these beacons at all times, the potential for self-misdirection is enormously heightened and perhaps unavoidable.
First, we need to bear in mind that over the course of the history of their premodern contact, with virtually no exceptions that can now be ascertained, the status roles of the Chinese and the blacks with whom they chanced to come into contact remained constant and unchanging. Such is not to say that we should construe status relationships as having been static and immutable within each of the two distinct groups. Regardless of his own social status, a Chinese of that time would certainly have regarded a kunlun emissary to the imperial court, whether encountered or not, as possessing higher status than a kunlun merchant or a common kunlun slave, even if only in relative terms. Nevertheless, judging from the documents we have, these status relationships were surely invariant in the sense that they were never reversed or inverted between the two groups. In other words, the Chinese were always the more powerful party in terms of status, possessing the proverbial “upper hand” in all relations with the blacks. Surely in all the instances of domestic interaction for which we possess records, even after they became facilitated by Arabs via their prolific slave trading in Africans from approximately the ninth century C.E. onward, we must see the Chinese as having initiated contact with the blacks, typically through the act of seeking to procure them as slaves, and also thereby as having controlled its terms, often to the detriment, subjugation, and degradation of the black subjects with whom they came into intercourse. The historical record gives no indication that members of these culturally disparate peoples ever met or interacted on terms of equality, and therefore the indulgence of the kind of delusional thinking that allows such to become the case should not be permitted.
Second, for any aspect of Chinese-kunlun relations that are subjected to scrutiny, we should remain vigilantly mindful of the exclusively one-sided nature of the combined record of contact. In the single directionality of its narration, the story of earliest Chinese perceptions of the blacks they encountered approximates what we are coming to learn, for instance, about the perspectives of the citizenry of continental Europe during the Renaissance or, with more circumscription, those of the English of Tudor (1500–1603) and Stuart (1603–1714) times on the nascent but growing communities of Africans, East Indians, and eventually African Americans in their midst.8 However, even granting this single parallel of the largely one-way nature of the racializing discourses evinced in both of these comparable cases, the contrasts we are forced to draw between the continental European situation in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the British situation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries versus the Chinese one from the seventh through the twelfth still seem far more extreme and more numerous than the similarities. The medieval Chinese records are preciously fewer, less comprehensive, and less consolidated than their Renaissance European or, especially, their early modern British counterparts are.9 Moreover, whereas literacy in the vernacular languages and particularly in the colonizing language of English did eventually exhibit itself increasingly as a significant trait among the black populations of the Continent and Britain, such was never the case in the Chinese context.
Indeed, the complete absence of writing of any kind among the Chinese-encountered African blacks throughout this initial age of contact and yet the presence of an already age-old, long-cherished, and continuous employment of writing among the Chinese of that time has resulted, by default, in all documentation of interaction generating entirely from one side of the contact—that is, the Chinese side. Just as the blacks of the premodern age were never regarded as equals of the Chinese in terms of their status as individuals, neither was their “civilization,” in large part because it lacked writing, ever regarded as even remotely rivaling China’s in collective terms. Moreover, from the Chinese perspective, there was a direct, intimate, and almost perfectly congruent equivalency established between these two levels—the individual and the collective—that resulted in glaringly negative appraisals of both. Thus, we can hardly deny that the “history” of contact between blacks and Chinese—whenever construed exclusively as the unprocessed data that form the body of documentary evidence for historical construction—is overwhelmingly a “winner’s history.” Recognizing this fact should rightly prepare us to be wary of certain attitudes expressed in the received record. It should also incline us to be critical of the kind of triumphalism that can run rampant in the writing of any chroniclers who viewed themselves as representatives of a culture so vastly superior as that of the Chinese in comparison to all the blacks they either did or did not encounter.10 Our principal obligation is to strive for greater objectivity in our day, even if it in the end eludes us.
Third, and perhaps prompted by my allusion above to the latter-day Arab slave-traffickers who functioned as facilitators of contact between Chinese and blacks, especially whenever it involved Africans, we cannot lose sight of the reality that we are about to immerse ourselves in a story in which Europeans played no discernible role because they simply were not present until extremely late in the overall continuum of interchange. Whereas we must, of course, accept the fact that the Chinese experience of blacks ultimately became much mediated by the Europeans who came to China, with their black slaves in tow, from the sixteenth century onward until the nineteenth, such was not the case during earlier centuries—the period of more than a millennium before Sino-European contact began, the capacious span of time during which the present saga unfolds. Hence, I caution Western readers that they now verge on entering a less commonly depicted and less thoroughly familiar world in which Europeans not only played no mediating role in any interactions but also were in fact precluded from doing so by their absence. Consequently, what follows herein is a portrayal of Asian and ultimately Afro-Asian realities—that is, a reconstruction of what was preeminently an experience of protracted mutual entanglement involving basically three groups: ethnic Han Chinese; other Asians, including Muslim Arab West Asians, of increasingly broad geographical distribution; and East Africans, predominantly of Somalia but also Kenya and possibly points further south. As I have demonstrated especially in conclusion, whereas they did have their contributing role to play in this untold saga of contact, continental Europeans who ventured into China at its end point added to the story in only an indirect and incidental way.
One Hue throughout Three Vistas
The chapters that follow constitute key episodic installments in the saga of premodern interaction that transpired between the peoples of various other heritages who came to be designated in the Chinese sources as black, including especially in later centuries those of African ancestry, and the specific representative subgroups of the Chinese population with whom they were often forced to have dealings. Even while great in its implications, this is an unheralded saga in which the particulars have largely lain undisclosed, and my intent is to provide the kinds of guideposts that will lead to it becoming better known. However, as crucial as their exposition here is, these installments should not be construed by readers as either exhaustive or conclusive, for they cannot conceivably account for or encompass every instance of contact, interaction, exchange, and confrontation that actually did occur. Even allowing for the unmatched comprehensiveness of the voluminous traditional Chinese literary corpus, meaningful but unrecorded and thus forgotten exchanges between groups and individuals doubtless did take place. There is also always the possibility that a document of the most revealing kind has either been lost or remains as yet undiscovered. Consequently, what I have labored to provide here are reasoned interpretations about this momentous saga of contact based on the frequently fragmentary, impressionistic, and inconclusive evidence—again, all of it from the Chinese side—that remains. Educated though they may be, these interpretations of the evidence on my part ultimately can never escape their consignment to the realm of postulation. Still, that being the case, postulate I must, for I believe the service rendered by even an imperfect version of the story to exceed by far the damage done by continuing to allow it to remain untold.
Chapter 1 is foremost devoted to answering the specific question of precisely when a Chinese consciousness of peoples who are black first arose, and toward that purpose it explicates not only the incremental emergence of the traditional Chinese construction of otherness but also, over centuries, that of the much lesser known construction of blackness. However, even