The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt
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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