The Magical Kunlun and “Devil Slaves”: Chinese Perceptions of Dark-Skinned People and Africa Before 1500
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SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS Number 122 July, 2002 The Magical Kunlun and “Devil Slaves”: Chinese Perceptions of Dark-skinned People and Africa before 1500 by Julie Wilensky Victor H. Mair, Editor Sino-Platonic Papers Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA [email protected] www.sino-platonic.org SINO-PLATONIC PAPERS is an occasional series edited by Victor H. Mair. The purpose of the series is to make available to specialists and the interested public the results of research that, because of its unconventional or controversial nature, might otherwise go unpublished. The editor actively encourages younger, not yet well established, scholars and independent authors to submit manuscripts for consideration. Contributions in any of the major scholarly languages of the world, including Romanized Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) and Japanese, are acceptable. 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Yale University Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Images of the Kunlun from the Fifth Century to the Song 4 Chapter 2: Chinese Knowledge and Perceptions of Africa and Africans through the 21 Song Chapter 3: Chinese Knowledge and Perceptions of Africa and Africans during 32 the Yuan and Ming Conclusion 42 Bibliography 45 Julie Wilensky, "The Magical Kunlun and 'Devil Slaves,'" Sino-Platonic Papers, 122 (July, 2002) Introduction Historians have not yet established the precise date of the first contacts between the Chinese and African peoples. Moreover, the available sources make it impossible to calculate exactly how many Chinese people traveled to Africa or how many Africans went to China in premodern times. What Chinese sources do reveal, however, is how Chinese people viewed those with ·dark skin and how these perceptions changed over time, reflecting first what Chinese people imagined, and later, what they knew about African countries and their inhabitants. Perceptions changed as knowledge and exploration of the countries and peoples of Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and East Africa increased. This essay examines a combination of nonfiction accounts, fictional literature, geographi~al sources, and travel diaries from the Tang (618-907) to the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) to analyze the shifts in Chinese perceptions of people with dark skin and Chinese knowledge of Africa and Afric~ns. * Beginning in the Tang dynasty, Arab traders brought a number of East African slaves to China. Although historians have studied the African slave trade extensively, particularly the export of West African slaves to the Americas after 1500, a much smaller body of research focuses on the premodern East African slave trade, and fewer sources still mention black slaves in China. From the eighth to the fourteenth centuries; the Arabs controlled this vast slave trade, which stretched not only along the entire coast of East Africa and throughout the Arab world but as far east as China. Black slaves were just one of many commodities in the Arabs' large-scale maritime trade with China, which peaked during the Tang and Song dynasty (960-1275). The Jiu Tang shu ti~iI (Former Tang history) mentions that the Arabs sent delegates to the Chine~e court in 651, marking the first recorded official contact between the Chinese government and the Arab caliphate! By the ninth century, a sizable community of Arabs lived in Guangzhou, and the local residents could have seen African slaves on trading ships and in Arab homes. I am grateful to my advisor, Valerie Hansen, for her help throughout the writing process. I greatly appreciate her extensive feedback, especially her careful checking and many revisions of my translations. I would also like to thank Victor Mair, who also read several versions of the essay. He offered many helpful editorial suggestions, including substantial revisions of several translations. I Jiu Tang shu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju), 198: 5315. Reference provided by Raphael Israeli, Muslims in China: A Study in Cultural Confrontation (London: Curzon Press, 1980), 80. 1 Julie Wilensky, "The Magical Kunlun and 'Devil Slaves,'" Sino-Platonic Papers, 122 (July, 2002) Some wealthy Chinese people even owned African slaves, whom they used as doorkeepers. The first chapter of this paper seeks to explain how Chinese people perceived these black slaves by analyzing representations of people with dark skin in fictional and nonfiction sources from the fifth century through the Song dynasty, tracing the evolution of the meanings and connotations of the term kunlun ~-$. This mysterious and poorly understood word first applied to dark-skinned Chinese and then expanded over time to encompass multiple meanings, all connoting dark skin. This chapter examines the meaning of the term kunlun in nonfiction before and during the Tang; fictional tales about magical, superhuman kunlun slaves from the Tang fiction compendium Taiping guangji /t zp: • ~c (Extensive Gleanings of the Reign of Great Tranquility); and finally, representations of the kunlun from a nonfiction writer from the Song, Zhu Yu *~. Although fictional portrayals do not necessarily provide information about what actual African slaves experienced in China, fiction is a valuable source because its popularity reveals widespread cultural perceptions of people with dark skin. Histories and other nonfiction accounts, on the other hand, indicate how some Chinese viewed these people with dark skin, but it can be difficult to determine the readership and popularity of these sources because the information they contain does not seem to have reached a wider audience. Were these Tang and Song images of the kunlun based on direct contact between Chinese and African peoples? When did the Chinese make a conceptual link between the kunlun slaves in China and the countries and peoples of East Africa? The second chapter addresses these questions by examining Chinese histories and geographies from the Tang and Song that describe African countries and their inhabitants. The answer to the first question is straightforward: a few Chinese may have visited Africa during this time, but most, if not all, Chinese knowledge about Africa and Africans came from the Arabs, who brought specific geographic knowledge of the countries along the maritime trade route between East Africa and China. Most of the Chinese descriptions of Africa were compiled by authors who never left China and gleaned their information about foreign countries and peoples from Arab traders living in China. Regardless of whether these accounts indicate direct contact between Chinese and African people in the Tang and 2 Julie Wilensky, "The Magical Kunlun and 'Devil Slaves,'" Sino-Platonic Papers, 122 (July, 2002) Song, however, they reveal Chinese historians and geographers' increasing knowledge of Africa and Africans. This new knowledge allowed the Chinese to make a connection between the kunlun slaves in China and the East African slave trade. Once the Chinese made this connection between the kunlun and the African slave trade, did the meaning of the word kunlun shift again? And how did China's maritime exploration of the East African coast in the early