The Blacks of Premodern China

Conclusion

Conclusion T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) once asserted, “Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say ‘this we know.’”1 Yet, whereas this observation would seem to be irrefutably true, whenever we seek to elucidate a subject as recondite as the nature of earliest contact and interaction between the people of China and the plethora of peoples they successively designated as black, we are perhaps too easily daunted by the opaqueness faced and thus are lured into overstressing those things we feel incapable of ever knowing. Defaulting to such a stance is in certain respects understandable, and in many instances we find its reasonableness underscored, for many elements of obstruction beset this particular history of contact and conspire to engender as well as reinforce our pessimism. Surely, as we found in the example of the black slaves of Guangzhou, the adoption of such a position is justified in our attempts to determine, for instance, the precise details of how it was that these unfortunates were ferried into their Chinese captivity. For answers to such a question, we are forced to resort entirely to speculation and, in the end, confront the fact that no matter how desperately we might seek answers to such a query, the data will never be forthcoming, if they ever existed in the first place. Nevertheless, when we confront such vacuities in our understanding as the one posed by this question of what the experience of transport must have been like for the Guangzhou-bound black slaves, we should remain mindful that we can still glean some highly tenable insights through a process of analogizing. In the first place, as I have endeavored to convey it herein, we do at least possess a firm sense of what Hans K. Van Tilburg, in his Chinese Junks on the Pacific: Views from a Different Deck, has called “the living culture of Chinese vessels,”2 wherein we have exposed the near-predatory conditions as they existed on Chinese seagoing merchant craft of the Song period. As we learned, commonplace within this living Chinese seafaring culture were chief disciplinarians, vice disciplinarians, and other such individuals—men 128 conclusion in possession of vermilion seals that permitted them to flog and ill-treat their crewmen to the point of death in order to maintain discipline. We need only recall our informant Zhu Yu’s definitive remark on the subject: “In the event someone dies [from such a beating] or is lost at sea, these officers appropriate the man’s property.”3 Our appreciation for the harrowing significance of Zhu Yu’s observation only leads us further toward a concomitant respect for the undercurrent implications the ocean perceived as a kind of netherworld where property and persons are subject to irretrievable loss. Writing a half-century earlier, perhaps Zhu Yu’s near-contemporary Zhou Qufei put the point best when he poignantly commented, “Once one has set forth upon the forbiddingly blue-green sea, there can be no accounting for life or death, no turning back to the realm of men.”4 From the perspectives of these well-informed individuals , only the foolhardy could fail to regard the great oceans as the last of then-known frontiers and as potential points of no return, and never does one decide to venture upon them casually. Clearly, perhaps even more threatening in their minds than the natural predations of the seas were their human ones, for—alluring as they might be to the adventurous—these expansive waters were dreaded as zones teeming with disorder, as places where the normal codes of civility to which one was accustomed on land need not at all apply. Granted, the foregoing grim images are such as we can derive exclusively from the incidental descriptions that we fortunately possess of life and conditions aboard Chinese merchant ships, as they obtained among Chinese crews of the early to late twelfth century c.e. We hardly need either doubt or question that these were essentially the same circumstances in which the original kunlun slaves of Malay extraction continued to subsist long after that time and, to the degree that it was possible, make their marginalized presences known, for we learn from Leonard Andaya, among other present-day scholars, that representatives of this ethnic stock frequently served the Chinese as navigational guides well into the fifteenth century and the Portuguese in the same capacity in the sixteenth century.5 Yet the situations of...