The Blacks of Premodern China - Don J. Wyatt Encounters with Asia

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divorce our deliberations from the how. Nor, evidently, can we afford to dismiss all consideration of the where. In this chapter we find that the first encounters between the Chinese and those they deemed black occurred not in China proper so much as in the various proximate archipelagos and islands that comprised China’s southernmost oceanic frontier. Moreover, we learn that the Chinese construct of blackness exhibited great elasticity. Under its rubric we discover that the Chinese included not only an array of verifiable blacks, such as Malays and Khmers, with whom they were known to have interacted but also a number of sundry peoples so described whose exact identities cannot be verified.11 Additionally we find that we cannot avoid a consideration of the Chinese entertainment of the existence of wholly imaginary blacks, who were indeed beings who occupied that shadowy middle ground between the human and the animal. Yet, most importantly, this chapter demonstrates that prior to their actual historical encounter with African blacks, the Chinese already maintained an abiding, if semifantastical, internal concept of what being black—as opposed to Chinese—necessarily meant.

      Chapter 2 provides an unusually enlightening portal of interiority by bringing us to China proper and thereby to a consideration of blacks brought to and inescapably inserted in—if neither really immersed nor integrated into—the Chinese cultural context. In this venue we find that three factors dominated. First is the localization or even confinement of this particular set of blacks exclusively to the southeast coastal city of Guangzhou. Second is their invariant status as slaves. Third is the ethnogenesis—the formation as an ethnic group—of these slaves as having derived from their original homeland (or, as is shown to have been the case from the Chinese perspective, habitat), which—based on the accrued evidence—we are led to conclude can have been nowhere else than Africa. In the end, however, despite what it reveals, our encounter of the blacks in their Chinese setting is perhaps as frustrating as it is revelatory because for every aspect of their apparently wretched existence that is revealed to us there remain countless other aspects that are destined to hopeless irretrievability. Moreover, although it thematically transverses the entire book, readers will find that the important subtheme of slavery dominates as the central subject of concern only in this second chapter.

      Chapter 3 relocates us to what probably is, at once, the most expected and yet least explored venue for our unveiling of and exposure to premodern China’s blacks, and this setting is the northeastern coastline (incorporating specifically the Horn) of Africa. This occasion for Africa as venue for the consequential interaction between these two distinct peoples was afforded entirely by the unprecedented voyages embarked upon to this and other Indian Ocean lands under Chinese imperial commission between the years 1405 and 1433. However, heretofore, the voyages themselves have commanded greater sway over the attentions of scholars—and, by extension, the public—than any encounter between the Chinese and a single people or collection of peoples resulting from them. In this chapter, by focusing to the exclusion of all else on this often vaguely referenced but inadequately explored or understood story of encounter between Chinese and Africans in the native place of the latter as opposed to the former, I have endeavored to rectify this situation. My approach aims at raising this singular moment of intersection to the level of something more than a sidebar. Thereby, while stopping short of augmentation that is either exaggerated or misrepresentative, I hope to have made the potency of the first known arrival of the Chinese in Africa and its relevancy to the more extensive history of China’s premodern dealings with its blacks not only better known but also better felt than previously.

      Needless to say, reconstituting the saga of encounter between premodern Chinese and the diverse array of peoples they described as black, whether inside or outside of China, is a complex enterprise. Any reconstitution of the story, no matter how earnest and engaged, must necessarily also reflect its convolutions. In the attempt provided herein I hope to avoid the summary pitfall forecast near the middle of the previous century by the preeminent Asianist Paul Pelliot (1878–1945), who theorized insightfully that trying “to unravel such an entangled skein would require a whole monograph, only to reach perhaps an indifferent result.”12 In the end my labors reflected here may well not advance us as significantly toward the objective of untangling Pelliot’s most aptly described skein as might ideally be desired. Nevertheless, with any luck I have—at the very least—eluded such an ignominious fate in this matter as rightly befalls one who tenders only the kinds of conclusions that will elicit indifference.

      CHAPTER ONE

      From History’s Mists

      EVEN THE MERE suggestion of the existence of blacks in the China of premodern times no doubt strikes many readers as a novel, if not wholly outlandish, concept. It is an idea that the mind seems to resist reflexively, and even as so much of today’s revisionist scholarship continues its contestation of the myth of ancient-world isolation, many factors also conspire to elicit this unyieldingly incredulous manner of reaction to the suggestion. In my making the counterintuitive case for a black presence in early China, my situation strikes me as not differing greatly from that of the historian Jack Forbes, who—in his recent study of the speculative transatlantic forays of early native Americans into European waters—remarks, “Most people generally have probably never heard of the idea that ancient Americans might have traveled to other parts of the globe.”1 In other words, whether possessing the corroborating evidence or not, for one to tender such a contention is at least to run the risk—perhaps justifiably—of inviting disbelief.

      Although I will make the contrarian case for its rapid diminution in the concluding chapter of this book, the resistance, even outright hostility, customarily incited in the modern mind by the idea of contact in remote antiquity between representatives of cultures situated on widely dispersed continents is far from extinguished, and several conventional assumptions serve to reinforce it. We need only return to the case at hand to begin to account for some of the factors that engender disbelief in the idea of contact anciently between China and continental Africa.

      We can begin by simply acknowledging the sheer distance separating the two places. As if this objective fact were not daunting enough, we cannot deny that this distance was likely all the more vast psychologically, almost to the point of being unfathomable, in the days before sail-powered, compass-directed navigation emerged to provide the most advanced of all means over the almost unthinkable concept of travel by horseback or on foot between these disparate regions.

      Whereas the physical distance in mileage between China and Africa serves as an obvious and objective divisor for everyone, especially for Westerners with limited knowledge of either place, we must also add a subjective factor—that is, the mental distance created by the inability to penetrate the residual veneer of exoticism attached to both locations. The proclivity for succumbing to the notion of China and Africa as inherently “exotic”—and thus existing apart from our normal realm of experience—not only has the potential for veiling each locale hermetically from the other but also can lead to the stifling of earnest inquiry by inclining us summarily to preclude all possibility of conceivable interchange between the two irreducibly distinct geographical zones. Therefore, an overweening susceptibility to the influence of exoticism can result in a kind of masking or shrouding mental partition that interposes itself between us and China or Africa, thus resulting in an insurmountable mental barrier that reinforces the isolation of each place from the other, rendering them both mutually impenetrable.

      Surely most prominent among the conspiratorial factors that engender incredulousness at the very idea of the presence of substantial numbers of blacks in early China is empirical. It is also the most simplistic and insidious factor because it involves our incapacity to refrain from projecting the present-day situation onto the past. As any visit to China today is likely to reveal, blacks, meaning individuals of African ancestry and descent, are certainly by far the most underrepresented of all those ostensible races or ethnicities either temporarily or permanently now inhabiting the Chinese landscape. Therefore, based mainly on our observation of the paucity to near-total absence of blacks from the Chinese contemporary scene, it is quite natural to impute a comparable dearth of “blackness” back onto the past of several centuries ago. Consequently, hindsight informed by present-day realities

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