The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt
compounded for his contemporary readers by his chilling reference to them as “delight[ing] in chewing up and devouring humans, just like luocha (rakshasas) or evil ghosts.” We do discover that the Chinese doubtless found traits in the kunlun that they could admire or, perhaps better put, marvel at in a grotesque sort of way; these include their reputed capabilities for rendering wild animals docile and their nearly fishlike natural aquatic abilities. Most of all, though, Huilin’s description of the various breeds of kunlun is tempered by disgust. Even if we deem his to be among the more generous descriptions (which for that time it was), we can neither overlook nor diminish his general tone of revulsion at the barbaric customs of the kunlun, which—from a Chinese standpoint—were not even deserving to be designated as customs. We can only conclude that Huilin, perforce, like countless numbers of Chinese before and after him, felt he had no choice but to consign the kunlun to the lowest possible rung of the ladder of humanity. The complex of dread and repulsion that Huilin felt at the very idea of being in their presence, which stemmed not least from their blackness—after all, the first attribute to which he refers—must have left him no other option.
In the premodern world of which Tang China was a part, one universally recognized solution to the threat posed by confrontation with the other was the submission to higher authority yielded by the imposition of enslavement. From the most ancient times an acceptable response to the threat posed by the other has been to subdue him. As Frank Dikötter has astutely theorized, that critical discriminatory sequence of reasoning whereby black becomes equated with slave was arrived at fairly early in Chinese history, which might well have been exceptional in its rapidity because, in accounting for the European historical case, we encounter at least one surprising counterexplanation for the delayed occurrence of this equation that we assume to be universal.74 Deducing exactly why Chinese of the premodern period might have come to conflate blackness so intimately with slavery and why they did it so early is not difficult. For the Chinese, enslavement was, after all, a less costly means of dealing with the dark outliers of their known universe, with whom—if Huilin’s remarks are representative—they recognized no shared ethnic traits, than by perpetual warfare waged against them. Enslavement was also preferable and more cost-effective than war because the Chinese themselves were not fated ultimately to be the principal slavers. By and certainly after the eighth century C.E., when the other as African became perhaps as prominent as the enslaved Melakan or Khmer, the chore of actually procuring most of those slaves was primarily left to the Arabs. There were also simply fewer impediments and hazards—legal, moral, and otherwise—involved in enslaving foreigners of any type, not to mention kunlun, than in enslaving other Chinese. Indeed, in many Chinese minds of that time the attractions of enslavement for dealing with either the authentically or the seemingly obstreperous foreigner cannot be overstressed, and it is interesting and ironical to note that its tangible trappings of physical restraint had been resorted to even by the unfortunate governor Lu Yuanrui. We can little doubt that he had regarded shackling the unruly foreign merchants on his watch as the best and safest answer to his developing problem. Yet, we can also note that it was his own misstep in aggression, his fatal threat to bind his threatening guests, that sealed his doom more than anything else he said or did.
If the foregoing rationales represent primarily reasons of expedience, then—before moving forward with the narrative—we should at last ponder that impetus behind the Chinese enslavement of the kunlun that arguably surpasses all others in importance. Especially in relation to the menacing kunlun, the Chinese came to favor enslavement such that it became a predilection, and its status as an almost instinctual response intended to mitigate danger led to its perpetuation. From ancient times, for the Chinese as well as for other peoples similarly positioned in relation to the other, enslavement was doubtless construed as the optimal means of negotiating and navigating spatial coexistence with those thought not to be of one’s kind. It was also a way of restoring cosmic order and balance in the Chinese confrontation with an encroaching, malignant force—that is, by relegation, regulating the other, a being who was normally held in check and at bay by the remove of physical distance. In this connection, a clause excerpted from Huilin’s “ethnography” is quite suggestive; he refers to the capacity of the kunlun for “taming and cowing ferocious beasts, rhinoceroses, elephants, and the like.” Conversely, such “taming and cowing” are precisely what the Chinese sought to visit upon the kunlun. In the broadest sense, these motives were compatible with the Chinese pattern of managing dealings not just with the kunlun but with all variants of the other, for if the foreigner, the stranger (interestingly, in middle literary Chinese often the identical term, keren, can also mean “guest”), could not be banished to or contained at a greater distance, then he must be controlled. Enslavement is, of course, the ultimate controlling device.
The perceptible cultural shortcomings that all kunlun, regardless of breed, exhibited had the effect only of encouraging Chinese designs on their enslavement and reinforcing the moral legitimacy of the practice as beneficial to the enslaved, much in the same way that the “white man’s burden” premise justified the most egregious imperialist actions whereby Victorian Britons subjugated millions of people of color around the globe in the nineteenth century. The kunlun’s cultural deficiencies, in other words, made him ripe for being dominated by those who were not deficient, and this domination was seen as fitting. To be sure, from a realistic perspective, the Chinese did probably realize that there must have been gradations of acculturation obtaining among the varieties of kunlun they encountered. However, at the root of their prejudices was the familiar stereotyping that diminishes distinctions and accentuates commonalities—the same seemingly eradicable dynamic that has always fueled antagonism and hatred toward the other. Chinese, in sum, saw the chasm of culture between themselves and any of the kunlun as so unfathomable as to permit these disparities among the latter always to be disregarded. Beholding only cultural vacuity when they gazed upon the primitive kunlun, the Chinese thus judged them exclusively by the physical denominator they had in common while ignoring the occasional differences, such as wavy versus curly or kinky hair. This common physical denominator, shared to one degree or another by all, was their relative blackness.
Chinese successes over time in enslaving the kunlun seem not to have relaxed the compulsion for doing so. During the first half of the sixteenth century Chinese merchants involved in trade with the newest foreigners—by this time Europeans such as the Portuguese and the Spanish—employed the kunlun of Melaka not only as laborers but also on occasion as go-between interpreters. Moreover, for their part, by the latter half of the same century, when they began gradually but more copiously to trickle into the empire, China’s European visitors were hardly remiss in emulating the willful pattern of subjugation of their hosts. We may take as a prime example the Italian Matteo Ricci (1552–1610),75 the first and greatest of the Jesuit fathers in China. In the years before acquiring his legendary mastery of Chinese, Ricci relied on native blacks (Malays?) as interpreters and imported blacks (Africans?) as servants—that is, before he was eventually compelled to change over to Chinese for both purposes upon learning and coming to appreciate that, as the historian Jonathan Spence relates it, “these blacks frightened the Chinese.”76 This observation by Spence is doubly revealing. On the one hand, it is reflective of the fact that blacks—understood by our definition as probably Malays—were commonplace enough throughout late sixteenth-century Chinese society as to provoke little comment in the indigenous literature. However, on the other hand, it reflects the fact that there must also simultaneously have existed blacks of African extraction in China, for why else would the natives be “frightened” by them? In other words, the only logical way of explaining the fear evoked in the hearts of Ricci’s Chinese contacts at the sight of peoples by this point ostensibly so familiar is to acknowledge that they were actually not that familiar, not at all kunlun of some customary stock but instead those who were just as much products of imagination as they were of reality.
Such, then, were the meager limits to which the Chinese perception of blacks had, by the end of the premodern era, progressed. In the end, one can justifiably quibble with whether, in the Chinese context, blackness, as Dikötter claims, “had always been a symbolic expression for slavery.”77 After all, other scholars, such as Raymond Dawson, have argued that chief among the Chinese distinguishing criteria between civilization