to the plausibility of blacks ever inhabiting early China that we would likely draw regarding the circumstances of any people who are scarcely and marginally represented in a particular place at any time. We assume that if they are not there in discernible numbers now, then they cannot ever have been so. Yet, while this kind of assumption is understandable and uncomplicated, as is so often the case with history, the truer and more intriguing conclusions emerge from those many instances in which the presumptive conclusion proves to be false. The present inquiry represents precisely such an example in which the imputation of the present situation back onto that of the remote past could not be more misguided or erroneous.
Moreover, in addition to the need to prepare ourselves for the adoption of an accepting attitude toward the historical complexities and outcomes involved, we cannot account for the experiences of blacks in China and among the Chinese of early historical times without also undertaking and effectuating some crucial recasting or reorienting in our thinking. Two such reorientations are absolutely crucial. Surely the first reorientation required of us is that we at least accede to the idea that blacks might well have long ago lived in China—that is, through a suspension of our initial disbelief, we must accept the premise that they might have actually been present there at some remotely earlier time of a millennium or more ago. A second and equally important reorientation demanded of us is that we immediately endeavor to expand our ethnological notion of what blackness means and how this condition of being might now differ ontologically and crucially from what it might have meant in the early Chinese context.
To be sure, the principal concern herein is with the peoples of African heritage and descent in their engagement with the Chinese. However, it is by no means with such an engagement that our story can begin, for premodern Chinese thought of and referred to a great variety of the peoples whom they encountered as black. At the same time that it remains foremost, we must endeavor to permit the Sino-African nexus to become our culminating concern because, as Frank Dikötter remarks in his landmark work on modern race consciousness, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, numerous peoples became black for the Chinese, even if, owing to a dearth of contact with them, they had not previously been regarded as being so prior to those times.2 We will learn that, especially with their more frequent interaction with neighboring foreigners resulting from the extensively expanded maritime activity of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of the Common Era, the Chinese cast this ascription of blackness ever more widely. This hypothesis of accretion and conflation whereby Chinese first attributed the trait of blackness indiscriminately and somewhat uniformly to any and all peoples of darker complexions than themselves seems more than plausible. It was first hypothesized by Paul Pelliot, who suggested that the attribute of blackness may well have been first assigned to “Indonesian Negritos,” who, of course, bear no connection to “African negroes,” and yet over time became extended and affixed, without any particular distinctions, to both groups.3
Thereby, largely resulting from increasing exposure to ever-larger numbers of peoples rarely or never before encountered but also out of ignorance stemming from confusion over the origins of the profusion of new populations confronted, the Chinese gradually came to affix the designation “black” to peoples of widely divergent and far-flung locales, all of whom are now recognized as representatives of distinctly different ethnicities. Documents of the Tang Dynasty and earlier refer to the Nam-Viet peoples of Champa as black. In subsequent writings the Khmers, Malaysians, and Malaccans (in Malayu, Melakans) are considered black. Blackness also became attributed indiscriminately to the Ceylonese (Sri Lankan), Malabar, and Bengali peoples of the Indian subcontinent as well as to those inhabiting the Andaman Islands.4 Much of the assignment of blackness to these various foreign groups was arbitrary and subjective and involved relative description. Moreover, it resulted largely from a process of ascription mainly by contradistinction, for as Dikötter points out, premodern Chinese had, from ancient times, been inclined to think of themselves, at least in comparison to many of their darker-skinned outer neighbors, as white.5 However, for our purposes, of greatest significance is the fact that, once they were encountered in later centuries, there was nothing to preclude the easy inclusion of Africans under this generalized, indeterminate, and randomly amorphous rubric of stigmatizing blackness. Needless to say, their consignment to this category of being would prove to be fateful from the very time it began, just as it still is.
Geographies of Otherness
A distinguishing feature of Chinese civilization is that place of origin or habitat has consistently predominated over skin color as a marker of foreignness and hence otherness. Beginning with the numerous references in such classical literature as the Zuo Commentary (Zuo zhuan) of the classic Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu),6 the four principal clusters of “barbarians” (siyi), the Yi, Di, Rong, and Mân, against whom the Chinese struggled for mastery of the Central Plain (Zhongyuan) in the first millennium B.C.E. were foremost denoted not by any perceptible physical distinctions in appearance or even culture (though the latter was certainly a level of distinction made) but instead by distinctions in location. Although there were numerous subgroups incorporated under each heading, the Yi, in addition to becoming the most common generic term for “barbarian,”7 eventually evolved to denote strictly those non-Chinese tribes of the east; the Di, the north; the Rong, the west; and the Mân, the south.
Such cultural distinctions as in language must surely have existed between what eventually emerged as the ethnically Han Chinese and their non-Han or fan neighbors. However, even while scholars have made progress in their reconstruction, these linguistic differences remain highly imprecise and largely dependent on speculation.8 Conversely, we can be certain of the fact that these surrounding tribes occupied different and, by and large, prescribed locations in relation to the Chinese that nonetheless set them physically apart from them. Consequently, in China from earliest times geography has been perhaps the most powerful determinant in demarcating us from them, and—as a construct for distinguishing the distinctiveness of the other—it has remained constant and exceptionally resilient, continuing up to contemporary times. Historically, much as is still the case, distinguishing the other was a process marked first by determining alienness in the most literal of senses—that is, by construing that the other in question necessarily hailed at least originally from a different place.
Nonetheless, if only because of its overwhelming importance nearly everywhere in our times, the comparative unimportance of skin color to the Chinese as an indicator of foreignness is striking. Differentiation in skin color persisted as only a secondary determinant of foreignness well into modern times, and the fact that such was the case for as long as it was invites explanation. We can begin by observing that, at least in prehistoric and earliest historical times, the skin colors of the different peoples the Chinese confronted and with whom they coexisted likely varied only within a fairly narrow range. In other words, limited in their contacts largely by topographical constraints and barriers, the ancient Chinese tended to meet others who were not that dramatically different in terms of the physical feature of skin pigmentation from themselves. Relative geographical isolation as well as other constrictive factors in comparison to other major world civilizations would lead to this situation not changing for China and its inhabitants for a substantial length of time. As such, the exposure of Chinese from earliest historical times only to peoples not drastically differing from themselves in terms of skin color stands as one of the very few myths of an “unchanging China” that evinces any credibility.
Nevertheless, as was to be the case in every other area of cross-cultural interaction, Chinese insulation from exposure to various peoples of markedly different skin coloration was destined inevitably to change. The first encounters between Chinese and persons they described as black, including the subset of those who were very possibly of African origin, occurred significantly earlier than we might think. Writing in The Star Raft: China's Encounter with Africa, a study that was heretofore singular for its combination of informed scholarship and accessibility on the subject, Philip Snow saliently—if some what indeterminately—observes, “Dark-skinned people were talked of in China as early as the fourth century” of the Common Era.9 However, perhaps as noteworthy as the physical presence of the blacks among them is the fact that the Chinese elected to refer to these people not by a term denoting color but instead by one with its roots firmly entrenched in geography—that