The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt
of his two hands, he grasps a snake. He feeds on them.”48
Taken together, the closely related, if not fully identical, examples culled from the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers demonstrate the astounding consistency with which an identical term can be received, understood, and interpreted across time. We find that in two vastly different historical contexts separated by nearly twenty centuries little has changed. On the one hand, the earliest black man reference in the corpus of the later Mohists establishes the nomenclature but most assuredly does not establish the conceptualization for those found in either of the later, more encyclopedic texts.49 On the other hand, we can ironically observe that as a term, heiren is nonetheless relied upon in all three textual contexts to summon forth mentally entities that we today classify as purely imaginary. For its premodern Chinese imaginers, however, heiren was employed precisely as a kind of conjuring device, an evocative catalyst that was used to bring to mind and signify something believed to exist somewhere on the most remote periphery of civilization, even if it had not necessarily been personally encountered and thereby verified as existing in nature.
Figure 1. Black man in Wang Qi, ed., Sancai tuhui [Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers], vol. 6. (1607; repr., Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1970), 2256. For those seeking it in a customary Chinese-bound edition of Sancai tuhui, this image is contained in the fourth of the six chapters of the division devoted to fauna, the thirty-third (Chinese recto but Western verso) page.
Yet, all the same, there is also a defining difference among the three examples that is altogether crucial. Whereas we must accept the later Mohist black man of the preimperial age as benign and hardly more than a hypothetical cipher, we can only receive the black man or black people of the Classic of Mountains and Seas and the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers as a fanciful and baleful specter. In these latter instances, especially when confronted with any of the accompanying pictorial representations that have been preserved, we struggle to deny that it is an image imbued with darkly malignant otherness. Furthermore, although it is delineated with the utmost concision (neither mentioning nor conferring a depiction that includes “the feet of birds” of the earlier version—perhaps a serious indication of an evolutionary shift in perspective?), the discourse of estrangement furnished by Wang Qi in the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers speaks proverbial volumes. Conforming as it does to the long-established Chinese convention of estrangement of the nonnative earlier discussed above, this caption, to be sure, defines the heiren in terms of his geographical remoteness (“Amidst the Southern Sea, upon Mount Bigsnake-follow”). Moreover, also in conformance to custom, it emphasizes his cultural deprivation (“and in each of his two hands, he grasps a snake. He feeds on them.”).
Most relevantly, even while he clearly represents a vestigial carryover from a much earlier age, the bizarre encyclopedic black man of the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers reveals no likelihood that the Chinese of the late Ming period either identified or associated the term heiren with any of the populations of humans with whom they were increasingly coming into contact—humans whom they structurally, if not nominally, nonetheless, regarded as black-skinned. We therefore must seriously doubt that the Chinese of the late Ming period were inclined to think of their black man as a man at all in the normative sense of the word. The Sinologist Roel Sterckx has commented on the tendency over the ages for Chinese to “portray barbarians who shared the habitats of the exotic bestiaries in the periphery of the Chinese cultural epicenter as having the inner disposition of animals.”50 However, surely, if we are to judge anything from the likeness of him depicted in the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers, the Ming black man was outwardly at least as much animal as he was human, perhaps signifying his condition of being even further removed well beyond the periphery of that epicenter. Especially given the historical lateness of the context and the concomitantly heightened knowledge of actual black humans on the part of Chinese that we should expect, the Ming black man, far more so than his prototype of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, is truly more it than he, and we can readily substitute that pronoun throughout the description to profoundly revealing effect. Our doing so presents us with a mental image that was every bit as dehumanizing in the late traditional Chinese context as it remains in our contemporary Western one: “Amidst the Southern Sea, upon Mount Bigsnake-follow, there exists the black man. It has the head of a tiger, and in each of its two hands, it grasps a snake. It feeds on them.” Through our substitution of the pronoun it, we recover historically a black man that was dramatically closer to the premodern Chinese perceived reality, one that was not only estranged from the Chinese in particular by geography and culture but also in every respect irredeemably separated from overall humanity in general.
Preconditioned for Bondage
Thus, we can find no extant Chinese literary evidence that, prior to modern times, substantiates whether the term heiren was ever used to refer directly to black humans, not to mention whether it was reserved expressly to be applied to Africans. Nevertheless, well before the beginning of the seventeenth century the presumed fusion between blackness of skin and the grave condition of being incapable of achieving any level of cultural attainment had already become firmly fixed in Chinese consciousness. Similarly, equally fused and entrenched in the Chinese mind had become the connection between blackness and innate, if not inveterate, savagery. Interestingly, whether in the example in the Classic of Mountains and Seas or that in the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers, one finds that actual skin coloration, while ascribed nominally and implied by context, goes unexplored. In neither case can we accept the tiger’s head of the heiren as having absolutely no basis of inspiration. A tiger’s head on an otherwise humanlike body is by any standard as fearsome a symbol of ferocity as need be imagined, much less encountered. Moreover, in reality, even if heiren was not the name by which they were contemporarily called, black-skinned humans—that is, the kunlun—must have struck the still relatively few Chinese of late traditional times who actually encountered them as not only alien but also intimidating and, much like the tiger, emblematic of bellicosity.51
An air of menace is integral to a substantial number of the accounts of contact between the Chinese and the succession of peoples they collectively called kunlun. Sometimes merely undercurrent and other times overt, dread of the kunlun in fact constitutes a kind of thematic thread coursing throughout most reports. Fear on the part of the Chinese, even if latent, often beset their interactions with the kunlun, and extant documentary records confirm this fact with enough frequency to make it difficult to ignore. From these sources we learn that the quality of Chinese-kunlun relations ranged across the entire spectrum of interactive possibilities, from the cooperative to the merely fractious to the foreboding. Our earliest information regarding the last category of engagement comes from a striking entry, already cited in the introduction, first officially preserved in the Old Tang History and dated as having occurred in 684 C.E.52 It involves the previously described death in that year of the Guangzhou governor Lu Yuanrui, who evidently was a man so lightly regarded both in his time and later that even his death is prosaically first recorded not independently but instead in the biography of the successor to his post.53 From this terse and unadorned entry we learn that “The territories of Guangzhou border the Southern Sea. Every year, the kunlun merchants arrive in [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.”54
The blandness of description in this rendition of the occurrence notwithstanding, in short order Lu Yuanrui’s murder became highly sensationalized. In addition, despite the passage of several centuries, his ignominious end still remained conspicuous enough to be recorded again in the celebrated Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive Mirror Aiding Government) of Sima Guang (1019–86), which was surely the preeminent historical work produced during the Song Dynasty.55 Sima’s preservation of this same episode in one of the most renowned of China’s privately written histories some four hundred years after it had transpired attests to its lingering resonance as a source of morbidly salacious