The following record is extracted from the book Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile, which was completed by the turn of the twelfth century by the obscure Chinese author Zhu Yu (1075?-after 1119). A substantial portion of the book consists of Zhu Yu’s observations made while accompanying his distinguished father, the maritime affairs official of Zhu Fu (1048-after 1102), in traveling to and briefly residing in Guangzhou, a location that became known to Westerners some seven centuries later in Chinese imperial history as Canton. The time of their residency at this prominent port city was sometime early on between the years 1102 and 1107. While there, conforming avidly to the age-old Chinese custom of recording of the strange and the anomalous, in this account, Zhu Yu describes two seemingly distinct types of foreign slaves encountered—presumably by him for the first time—at Guangzhou, slaves who—apart from their shared foreignness—are nonetheless implicitly bound together by their inveterate blackness.

Translated from the Chinese by Don J. Wyatt. Zhu Yu, Pingzhou ketan, Mohai jinhu ed. (Shanghai: Bogu zhai, 1921), 2.4. This translation CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Wildmen of Two Breeds

The wealthy in Guang[zhou] maintain numerous foreign slaves. These slaves are unequaled in strength and are capable of carrying—on their backs—several hundred catties (jin).[1] Neither their language nor their passions bear any connection to ours. Their natures are simple; they do not attempt to flee. For their part, the people of Guangzhou call them “wildmen (yeren).”

As for the color of these slaves, it is as black as ink. Their lips are red and their teeth are white. Their hair is curly (quan) as well as ochre-colored. They are both male and female, and they inhabit the various mountains across the sea.[2]

They eat raw food. But once they are acquired as slaves, they are fed cooked food. They thereupon endure days of diarrhea, which is referred to as “converting the bowels (huanchang).”[3] As a consequence [of this switch to cooked food], they occasionally die of illness. But if they do not die, then they are capable of being socialized. After a long period of socialization, they become able to understand what people say [to them], even though they themselves are incapable of [our] speech.

There [also] exists a kind of wildman that lives near the sea. These slaves are able to immerse themselves in water without batting or blinking their eyes. They are called kunlun slaves.[4]

[1] In the twelfth century, as in times past, a catty (sixteen Chinese ounces) was equivalent to approximately one and one-third English pounds.

[2] The actual term that appears in the passage for the hair color of the first group of wildmen is huang or “yellow.” Revealingly, the terms delineating the gender of these slaves as male and female, being female (pin) and male (mu), are the same as those traditionally affixed by the Chinese to animals or, more specifically, to cattle.

[3] This reference to these specific slaves as consumers of raw food is intentionally reflective of the classic taxonomy into which the Chinese have traditionally placed all foreign and therefore barbarous peoples—that is, “the raw and the cooked” (shengshu). The categorization “raw” (sheng) unmistakably signified quite literally “the uncultivated,” those truly at a greater remove in terms of their level of civilization, as opposed to those that they considered “cooked” (shu), those who were thought of as closer to but still always shy in this regard of the Chinese themselves. See Fiskesjö, Magnus. “On the ‘Raw’ and ‘Cooked’ Barbarians of Imperial China.” Inner Asia 1 (1999):139-68.

[4] Kunlun was a commonplace term that, since at least the third century of the Common Era, the Chinese had historically applied to those inhabitants of such proximate places as the nearby Indonesian archipelago that they frequently subjugated and that they generally classified as “black.” By the time of Zhu Yu’s observations, this designation had also come to comprise peoples originating from numerous other lands and even other continents—most specifically among them, those who hailed from Africa. Yet, the extant sources for any period prior to the advent of slaveholding Europeans at the turn of the sixteenth century, who of course appeared with their slaves in tow, shed little light on this subject. Consequently, for the medieval centuries and certainly earlier, our making any conclusive claims about precisely where many of these enslaved foreigners might have come from or exactly how they had come to be delivered into bondage in China will likely remain mostly a matter of educated conjecture.

Discussion Questions

  1. What does the location at which Zhu Yu encountered these slaves suggest about how they had arrived in China? Was it more likely to have been overland or by sea?
  2. Probably owing to sustained contact with one versus the other over a significantly longer period of time, based on the description, with which of these two types of foreign slaves can we surmise that the Chinese had greater familiarity? With which of the two can we assume they had much less familiarity? What elements of this account most strongly suggest this disparity?
  3. Why is the trait of blackness alone insufficient for us to categorize either of these types of foreign slaves in China as having been African? In order to make that case, what other sorts of evidence should we seek or at least hope to be able to acquire?

Related Primary Sources

Themes

Labor, Race, Social Death