The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt

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СКАЧАТЬ shown, “Language and lifestyle, including dietary habits and dress, seem to be the major differences that caught the attention of people when they thought about the cultural differences between Chinese and barbarians.”⁷³

      The extent of Huilin’s direct exposure to the various varieties of kunlun he describes remains an open question, and his description of these “barbarous peoples” in what would appear to be their native habitat, while probably something less than a total fabrication, is almost certainly not a firsthand account. Nevertheless, through it Huilin clearly exceeds well beyond the initially circumscribed concern with language to touch upon all of the criteria that Mu-chou Poo tenders as standard demarcators of difference in the Chinese context, and we can therefore take his effort as actually representing the first steps taken toward the construction of ethnography. Obviously, by our modern standards, Huilin’s protoethnography of the kunlun is overtly crude and prejudicial. Nonetheless, we can little dispute its consonance with what likely were the prevailing attitudes of his times. In other words, we can hardly expect him to offer an account of the kunlun that differed radically from what his potential audience wanted to read. Ironically, the early Tang period is renowned for what scholars have long contended was a highly cosmopolitan outlook, one that incorporated with relative tolerance all varieties of peoples. However, Huilin’s words expose us to the limits of this supposed tolerant outlook. Clearly, the accommodating disposition of the early Tang was reserved only for those peoples whom the Chinese perceived as possessing at least a semblance of culture; it was never meant to extend to those peculiar classes of outlanders whom they regarded as savage, cannibalistic, or black.

      In keeping with the spirit of ethnography as a genre, through Huilin’s brief entry we can discern much more about how the Chinese actually tended to regard the kunlun than how they defined them. We learn that at least some Chinese recognized different groups or “races” of kunlun, a fact that, given the Chinese emphasis on the geographical basis for determining otherness, implies they were understood neither as all occupying nor necessarily as all originating from the same locale. Even while they are described as “base and lowly peoples,” there is no denying the undercurrent of dread in Huilin’s comments, which seems precipitated by the mere black and exposed physical presence of the kunlun and which was no doubt 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 СКАЧАТЬ