The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt

is not a horse” discourse, which they debated in common with their rival nominalist and dialectician counterparts Hui Shi (ca. 380–305 B.C.E.) and Gongsun Long (b. 380 B.C.E.?),³⁵ was little more than a hypothetical abstraction, invented entirely for the purpose of advancing arguments toward a comprehensive theory of language that leads to knowledge. Their main aim was to illustrate their cardinal precept that any given term has the capacity for “picking out” only a limited part of reality.³⁶

      Therefore, on the one hand, the black man of these ancient Chinese writings was very much intended as a repository of color. However, on the other hand, whether construed from an ethical or an ethnological standpoint, he was also intended to be rather colorless, for he bore neither the figuratively immoral nor the racial associations for the later Mohists that we automatically attribute to the term today. Moreover, given that they could not claim knowledge of the existence of real black persons—that is, Africans—at such an early stage of history, the later Mohist black man was, at best, native in constitution as well as in conception. Consequently, even if we take the unwarranted step of going to the extreme of granting this novel construct a concretized reality, we can nonetheless be confident that whatever the later Mohists had intended for their black man to represent, he most assuredly was not, in their view, a living and breathing African.

      There is an uncanny dimension of surreal serendipity in the later Mohists of China’s preimperial age arbitrarily positing the hypothetical existence of a corresponding segment of humanity that fully existed in reality a half-world away from them. In their time, had they even been aware of it, there would surely be little reason to think that such a correlation would ever matter. However, coincidences between the theorized and the true can be prophetic, and in light of what was to come, we as moderns find that this first Chinese reference to a black man, even as an abstract and invented intimation, can hardly be emptied entirely of its alteric resonance. Inherently, the heiren represented to his Chinese imaginers something quite different in kind from themselves. We will discover that, beginning with this first archaic instance, just as heiren is more than merely suggestive of skin color for us, premodern Chinese too came to regard this particular attributive term as not only denoting the idea of black-skinned but also connoting many additional stigmatizing associations. For these reasons, even upon its first very early emergence, the term heiren prefigured implications for the future reception of black-skinned individuals by Chinese that would be immense, decisive, and inescapable.³⁷

      If the first of all Chinese references to a black man or black people is to be found almost incidentally in the somewhat obscure portion of a major philosophical work, then we should perhaps not be surprised to find the second reference surface, with nearly equal happenstance, in one of the most significant mythological writings in the Chinese cultural heritage. Interestingly, this second reference succeeds the first by a maximum of only a couple of centuries, for it appears in the earliest and most celebrated of China’s geocosmological topographies, the anonymously written Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing),³⁸ which was “compiled no later than the beginning of the first century B.C.E..”³⁹ In this protean but peculiar work, which the translator Anne Birrell has described as having “less to do with geography than with cosmology and mythogeography,”⁴⁰ within its eighteenth and final taxonomic book, “The Classic of Regions within the Seas” (“Haineijing”),⁴¹ we find the fleeting mention of the following: “There are also the black people. They have the heads of tigers and the feet of birds. Clutching a snake in either of their two hands, they are constantly chewing on them.”⁴²

      Like many of the Chinese writings dating from the beginning of the imperial age or earlier, the anonymously compiled Classic of Mountains and Seas possibly evolved over several centuries before achieving its present form. For this succinct reference to black people and for other reasons we must regard the emergence of this work as a noteworthy development in several ways. As the historian Richard J. Smith points out, as a text the Classic of Mountains and Seas is clearly the product of a wide range of disparate historical, mythological, and divinatory sources, “including, perhaps, Greek, Middle Eastern, and Indian legends.”⁴³ It is also significant to our inquiry because it represents “the earliest known illustrated account of barbarians in China,”⁴⁴ though its status in this regard is problematized by our not knowing whether oldest editions contained illustrations or, if they did, whether the illustrations preceded and were in fact the genesis for the written text we now possess. Recognizing the age-old Chinese penchant for recording the fantastic as well as realistic descriptions of foreign peoples, of greatest importance to our concerns is Smith’s observation that the freakishly “barbarian” peoples cataloged in the pages of the Classic of Mountains and Seas are meant at least occasionally to identify “actual culture groups.”⁴⁵ Indeed, several of the tribes of man-creatures featured in the Classic of Mountains and Seas may well correspond to real peoples, whereas many more may not. The seminal question for our purposes, to be sure, is what to make of the community of semibestial individuals that it only once refers to as black. We perhaps find an answer in a curious adumbration of the instance just discussed.

      Remarkably, after its signal appearances in the later Mohist writings of probably the fourth century B.C.E. and the Classic of Mountains and Seas of no earlier than the second century B.C.E., the referencing of a specifically black man or black people occurs nowhere else in the entirety of the Chinese literary corpus until sometime in the early seventeenth century C.E., less than a half-century before the demise of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), an amazingly long period of separation of perhaps as much as two millennia from the time of its first occurrence. Granted, despite the venerable vintage of its locus classicus, nothing precludes the possibility that the term had become employed in oral parlance during the gaping interim period between the time of the later Mohists and the subsequent Classic of Mountains and Seas and that of the Ming Dynasty. However, the total absence of heiren from the intervening written record is conspicuous, and because of the natural proclivity for the spoken language to be reflected in writing at least to some degree by the relatively late date that it at last recurs, this lacuna has the effect of rendering any argument for the widespread currency of the terms “black man” or “black people” quite suspect. Moreover, the fact that heiren was unwritten in any subsequent text for so long into the imperial age is made all the more odd by the new Ming demographic situation, for African blacks, now in the servitude of their European as well as Arab masters, had become known if not altogether highly familiar fixtures of at least the Chinese coastal landscape. Yet, it is precisely against the backdrop of these much changed circumstances that the details of the Ming-period reference to a black man or black people are so unexpected and singularly strange.

      Stunningly, the heiren of late traditional times that we encounter in the pages of the Chinese encyclopedia Sancai tuhui (Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers), being a work that the reputable Shanghai scholar and official Wang Qi (fl. 1565–1614) compiled in 1607,⁴⁶ is in every respect no more of an advance beyond pure fantasy than what we encountered in Classic of Mountains and Seas. In fact, considering the very changed times and circumstances during which it surfaces, there is every reason for our regarding this latter-day reference as a regression or at the very least a willful fiction. With this much later reference to a black man, we are confronted with an image that is contrary to our rational expectation of what enhanced knowledge acquired through increased direct exposure to peoples considered black, now even frequently including African slaves, might produce. We receive an implied forewarning of what we are about to receive by dint of the fact that the colophonic description and graphic depiction of the heiren in the Illustrated Compendium of the Three Powers appear not in the work’s customary “attributes of man” (renshi) division but instead in its “birds and beasts” (niaoshou) division.⁴⁷ Indeed, as we gaze upon the drawing of the Ming-era black man, we are reminded, in an almost verbatim but paradoxically more and also less detailed way, of the severely limited information on the same topic that we could extract from the Classic of Mountains and Seas. This time, however, we are also supplied with an accompanying image (see Figure 1): “Amidst the Southern Sea, upon Mount Bigsnake-follow, there exists the black