The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt
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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,