The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt

Most of all, we are meant to remember Lu Yuanrui for the manner of his death—that is, at whose hands it occurred—as well as for the irresolution of its disposition:

      In the autumn, on wuwu (mouwu) of the seventh month [Western date: 8 September], the governor of Guangzhou, Lu Yuanrui, was killed by a kunlun. Yuanrui was stupid and cowardly, and his subordinates were unrestrained and devious. Whenever merchant ships would arrive, his subordinates would ceaselessly seek through extortion to divert profits for themselves, causing the merchant barbarians to complain to Yuanrui. Yuanrui [finally] sought to address the situation by calling for cangues, wishing to have [one group of foreign merchants] bound as punishment for their complaints.

      [Lu Yuanrui’s actions] enraged this group of barbarians, such that there was a kunlun among them who entered directly into Yuanrui’s offices, bearing a sword that he concealed in his sleeves. He then killed Yuanrui as well as more than ten of the people surrounding him and fled. No one [at the scene] dared to approach the kunlun [to prevent his escape]. The murderer boarded a ship and set to sea; the ship was pursued but could not be overtaken.⁵⁶

      The murder of Lu Yuanrui proves in many respects to be a watershed. From the two foregoing accounts in succession of the death of the ill-fated extortionist Guangzhou governor, we can extract a wealth of information about the nature and tenor of Chinese-kunlun intercourse during the fatefully momentous transition from Tang to Song times. Some of this information we glean is factual, but a good deal of it is also dispositional. Drawing from among the factual elements, we learn that in their earliest designation the kunlun were probably of Malay ethnicity, or to frame the matter conversely, that they were almost assuredly not Africans. Confirmation comes from the fact that the Chinese had since at least the beginning of the seventh century C.E. engaged in regular and thriving maritime trade along the South China Sea coast with the people they called kunlun. The expansion of trade precipitated by the removal of such rapacious officials as Lu Yuanrui indeed emboldened the kunlun and their Javanese neighbors to such an extent that they undertook raids of aggrandizement in 767 as far afield as the northern coastline of Vietnam, all for the purpose of, as the modern scholar of the Chinese Southern Sea (Nanyang) diaspora Wang Gungwu observes, establishing their “commercial supremacy” over the region.⁵⁷

      Additional corroboration of the highly probable Malay identity of the original kunlun and the location of their domain within greater Malaysia comes from the fact that a commentarial note dating from the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368), appended to the account in the Comprehensive Mirror Aiding Government by its editor Hu Sanxing (1230–1302), definitively informs us of the location of Kunlunguo, the fabled “kingdom of Kunlun,” or perhaps better put, it supplies us with some highly impressionistic directions for how to get there. We are informed: “The kingdom of Kunlun is located to the south of Linyi (Champa); [to travel there] one goes beyond Jiaozhi (Tonkin, present-day Hanoi) by sea for more than three hundred days. Customarily, in writing, Kunlun is the same [place] as Poluomen [Brahman?] (formerly constituting the entirety of the west coast of India, from Kulam in the south to the mouth of the Indus River in the north).”⁵⁸ A Song History entry of approximately the same vintage rather generically replicates at least Hu Sanxing’s approach to, if not altogether his specific landmarks for, finding the land called Kunlun by utilizing instead the kingdom of Shepoguo (Java) as the primary reference point: “Java is located in the Southern Sea. One arrives in this country from the east by means of a month at sea. Then, with a half-month’s rowing, one arrives at Kunlunguo.”⁵⁹

      Clearly there seems to be no premium placed on the accuracy of these “directions,” even if we are inclined to consider them as such, and it is difficult to discern which one of the two sets is more suspect. Were one to follow, for instance, strictly the latter set, then—quite implausibly—as the scholar Zhang Xinglang (also Chang Hsing-lang) (1888–1951)—who will loom as a large presence in our subsequent deliberations—observed, Kunlunguo “must be none other than Thailand (Xianluoguo).”⁶⁰ Such improbabilities notwithstanding, from such “directions” as these provided in the Yuan sources we can at the very least discern that the Chinese of the Tang and Song eras had regarded the inhabitants of Kunlun with whom they periodically interacted and interchanged through mercantile activity as hailing from some generalized region far to the south but also to the west—that is, from some vaguely defined place remote from China and not altogether lacking in proximity to points much further west, including, incidentally, the eastern coast of Africa.

      The historian Feng Chengjun (1885–1946), writing nearly seven centuries later in his milestone Zhongguo Nanyang jiaotong shi (History of Chinese Southern Sea Transit), offers us only slightly more specific parameters than does Hu Sanxing, stating: “Since ancient days, the kingdom of Kunlun has been imprecisely designated as a single zone, defined by the various countries extending to Annam (Zhancheng) in the north, to Java (Zhuawa) in the south, to Malaysia (Malaibandao) in the west, to Borneo (Poluozhou) in the east. At its severe extreme, it extends even to the east coast of Africa. We can think of all of this area as incorporating the territory of Kunlun.”⁶¹ On the basis of its sweepingly immense area, Feng Chengjun’s “Kunlun” is defined only loosely, to be sure. However, the expansive boundaries that Feng offers adumbrate the point earlier made that we should always be prepared to think of kunlun as geographically denoting a potential panoply of locations, ranging from its namesake range of mountains in Tibet to a substantial portion of an entire oceanic zone (see Map 1).⁶² Moreover, we can also intuit from Feng’s description that there may well have been, over the course of history, numerous “kingdoms” of Kunlun, with the precise location having been largely dependent on the time period of the reference. Such an understanding provides us with ample justification for believing that although the kingdom of Kunlun specifically referred to by commentators on the Comprehensive Mirror Aiding Government such as Hu Sanxing was no longer so near at hand as the landlocked mountains of Tibet, neither was it so distant from China proper as is the East African coast. This reasoning all the more reinforces rather soundly the view that the peoples to whom the Chinese of the Tang and Song periods initially affixed the appellation kunlun were more or less, especially at the farthest western extremes, exclusively Malaysians.

Map 1. The Nanhai region, ca. 1225. Adapted from Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill, trs., Chau Ju-kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu-fan-chï (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1911).

      Moreover, we are fortunately not solely dependent on Hu Sanxing’s particular notation for directions to the kingdom of Kunlun, which was sometimes in Song-period texts alternatively called Kunlunshan—with the suffix shan, in instances such as this one, somewhat counterintuitively denoting an “island” rather than its more standard translation as “mountain.” Writing perhaps a century earlier than Hu but only a half-century later than Sima, Zhao Rugua (1170–1231), in his Zhufan zhi (Description of Foreign Peoples), remarks succinctly that by “sailing the sea half a month [to the north of Shepo], one arrives at the kingdom of Kunlun.”⁶³ Although we need not dismiss the vague directions of Hu Sanxing outright, certain realities should incline us to give due credence to those supplied by Zhao Rugua. The genealogical records of the Song History do inform us of Zhao Rugua’s descent from a collateral branch of the dynastic imperial clan.⁶⁴ However, of all his contemporaries, only the famous Song-period bibliographer Chen Zhensun (fl. 1211–49) conveys anything to us about Zhao Rugua’s life, and Chen indeed informs us of very little, stating only that when he “served as a supervisor of maritime trade in Fujian, Zhao Rugua recorded [names and descriptions of] the various foreign countries and the commodities issuing forth from them.”⁶⁵ Yet, from this terse entry on the noteworthy Zhao family library contained in his important Zhizhai shulu jieti (Catalog of Books with Explanatory Notices of the Zhi Studio), we can further deduce that Zhao Rugua, in his official capacity as a maritime trade commissioner (shibo shi)⁶⁶ at the major port of Quanzhou, must assuredly have had frequent interaction with foreign as well as Chinese traders. Therefore,