The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt

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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 СКАЧАТЬ