The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt

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Map 1. The Nanhai region, ca. 1225. Adapted from Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, trs., Chau Ju-kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chï (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1911).

      Moreover, we are fortunately not solely dependent on Hu Sanxing’s particular notation for directions to the kingdom of Kunlun, which was sometimes in Song-period texts alternatively called Kunlunshan—with the suffix shan, in instances such as this one, somewhat counterintuitively denoting an “island” rather than its more standard translation as “mountain.” Writing perhaps a century earlier than Hu but only a half-century later than Sima, Zhao Rugua (1170–1231), in his Zhufan zhi (Description of Foreign Peoples), remarks succinctly that by “sailing the sea half a month [to the north of Shepo], one arrives at the kingdom of Kunlun.”⁶³ Although we need not dismiss the vague directions of Hu Sanxing outright, certain realities should incline us to give due credence to those supplied by Zhao Rugua. The genealogical records of the Song History do inform us of Zhao Rugua’s descent from a collateral branch of the dynastic imperial clan.⁶⁴ However, of all his contemporaries, only the famous Song-period bibliographer Chen Zhensun (fl. 1211–49) conveys anything to us about Zhao Rugua’s life, and Chen indeed informs us of very little, stating only that when he “served as a supervisor of maritime trade in Fujian, Zhao Rugua recorded [names and descriptions of] the various foreign countries and the commodities issuing forth from them.”⁶⁵ Yet, from this terse entry on the noteworthy Zhao family library contained in his important Zhizhai shulu jieti (Catalog of Books with Explanatory Notices of the Zhi Studio), we can further deduce that Zhao Rugua, in his official capacity as a maritime trade commissioner (shibo shi)⁶⁶ at the major port of Quanzhou, must assuredly have had frequent interaction with foreign as well as Chinese traders. Therefore, we can deem much of the information he provides in his book on such far-flung locations as Ceylon (Xilan) or modern Sri Lanka, Malabar (Nanpi), the Somali coast (Zhongli), Misr or Egypt (Wusili), and Sicily (Sijialiye) to have come to him through direct oral transmission.

      In appraising the overall value of the work as a primary source, the anthropologist William Lessa was compelled to comment that Zhao Rugua’s Description of Foreign Peoples “is so specific and detailed as to cause us to realize the extent of intercourse there was between China and the outside maritime world.”⁶⁷ The historian John Chaffee is even more emphatic in his appraisal, calling Zhao’s work “a uniquely important account of the Asian, African, and even Mediterranean maritime world as it was known to the Chinese in the thirteenth century, describing, first, countries and cultures, and second, the varieties of goods imported into China.”⁶⁸ Other extant texts, including the somewhat earlier Guihai yuheng zhi (Description of Mountains and Forests of the Region of the Southern Sea) written by Fan Chengda (1126–93) in 1175 and Lingwai daida (Notes on Lands beyond the Mountains) written by Zhou Qufei (j.s. 1163) in 1178, with varying degrees of detail catalog the extensive maritime world of late or Southern Song (1127–1279) times and refer especially to the southernmost reaches of the empire as well as various of the now indeterminate locales situated in the seas south of the Chinese mainland.⁶⁹ However, in the estimations of later traditional Chinese as well as contemporary Western scholars, upon its completion in 1226 Zhao Rugua’s Description of Foreign Peoples has remained unsurpassed, leading Chaffee to conclude summarily that it has “expanded the Chinese literati’s knowledge of foreign places and objects and has been an invaluable text for the history of maritime commerce ever since.”⁷⁰

      Just as important to us as the sources citing Kunlun and the location of this remote place is what it meant as an idea—that is, what by Tang and certainly Song times it had come to signify in the minds of its not-remote-enough Chinese observers. Thus, the hazy geographical coordinates provided notwithstanding, we must return to the above accounts of the vicious murder of the ethnic Han official Lu Yuanrui and his immediate entourage at the hands of a lone kunlun assailant for answers. They reveal information of greater meaning than the purely factual as they combine to contribute amply to our understanding of the Chinese premodern dispositional perspective toward the kunlun. From them we can be certain that those Chinese engaged in these early centuries of interaction with the kunlun unquestionably regarded them warily and with a conterminous mixture of condescension and trepidation, scorn and fear, no matter what they construed their majority nationality or ethnic composition to have been. Between the first notices on Lu Yuanrui’s murder in the late seventh century and that of its detailed summation by Sima Guang for all posterity at the end of the eleventh, additional source material of the most interesting kind on the kunlun was contributed to the intervening historical record by various individuals. Nevertheless, this material beclouds as well as enlightens, for in its tone it tends to reinforce long-established ideas about the perceived savagery prevailing among the kunlun and mostly thereby only reifies the threat posed to Chinese by them. As the famed Buddhist lexicographer Huilin (737–820), for example, observes in his expansive Yiqiejing yinyi (Pronunciations and Definitions for All the Scriptures), employing a variant form of the name generally assigned to them and equating it with the most generalized Chinese term for barbarian, “They are at times in vernacular speech also called gulun. They are the barbarous peoples (yiren) of the great and small islands of the Southern Sea.”⁷¹

      Yet, for all they do confirm about what we earlier could only hypothesize or surmise, these tandem accounts of the death of Lu Yuanrui are also keenly deserving of our interest for what they fail to reveal on the matter that is of greatest pertinence to our present deliberations. Whereas much in them is obviously directed at conjuring up utter and unreserved disdain for the kunlun, in neither account is there any mention of skin color. On the one hand, the skin coloration—the unalterable darkness or blackness—of any man of that time who, like the murderous assassin of Lu Yuanrui and his entourage, was described as kunlun might very well have been implicitly understood, and thus it simply dictated no explicit comment. On the other hand, however, it is also possible that, at least inasmuch as is reflected especially in the official and quasi-official reports, the inveterate foreignness of the culprit loomed larger in premodern Chinese consciousness than such a seemingly distinctive aspect of his appearance as color would for us today. As of old, the distinctiveness of foreignness may well have simply trumped that of appearance in these particular accounts. Yet, we need not look far for countervailing evidence, accounts of the kunlun that, in the transitional centuries of increasing contact between Tang and Song, place their skin color and all of its threatening associations on display. For proof we need but return to the remainder of Huilin’s observations:

      Being extremely black, they bare their naked frames. They are capable of taming and cowing ferocious beasts, rhinoceroses, elephants, and the like. There are many races and varieties of them, and thus there are the Sengqi, the Tumi, the Gutang, the Gemie (Khmer), and such. All are base and lowly peoples. Propriety and rightness are absent from their domains. They rob and steal for a living, and they delight in chewing up and devouring humans, just like luocha (rakshasas) or evil ghosts. Being different from those spoken by the various [other] foreigners, the languages that these peoples speak are perverse. They excel at entering the water, for they can remain there for the entire day and not perish.⁷²

      Having been primarily a linguist, Huilin’s ostensible interests would have concentrated on the place of the kunlun in the Chinese lexicon, and in fact, the title of his entry in his important early dictionary is precisely that—“Kunlun Speech” (kunlun yu). This focus should not surprise us, for anciently as well as presently dissimilarity in language, particularly the perceived degree of unintelligibility in comparison with one’s own, has served as one of the cardinal demarcating factors between the civilized and the uncivilized. Moreover, linguistic discordance, bundled with certain other specific factors, has assuredly served with particular tenacity as a marker of difference in China. СКАЧАТЬ