The Blacks of Premodern China

ONE: From History’s Mists

c h a p t e r o n e From History’s Mists Even the mere suggestion of the existence of blacks in the China of premodern times no doubt strikes many readers as a novel, if not wholly outlandish , concept. It is an idea that the mind seems to resist reflexively, and even as so much of today’s revisionist scholarship continues its contestation of the myth of ancient-world isolation, many factors also conspire to elicit this unyieldingly incredulous manner of reaction to the suggestion. In my making the counterintuitive case for a black presence in early China, my situation strikes me as not differing greatly from that of the historian Jack Forbes, who—in his recent study of the speculative transatlantic forays of early native Americans into European waters—remarks, “Most people generally have probably never heard of the idea that ancient Americans might have traveled to other parts of the globe.”1 In other words, whether possessing the corroborating evidence or not, for one to tender such a contention is at least to run the risk—perhaps justifiably—of inviting disbelief. Although I will make the contrarian case for its rapid diminution in the concluding chapter of this book, the resistance, even outright hostility, customarily incited in the modern mind by the idea of contact in remote antiquity between representatives of cultures situated on widely dispersed continents is far from extinguished, and several conventional assumptions serve to reinforce it. We need only return to the case at hand to begin to account for some of the factors that engender disbelief in the idea of contact anciently between China and continental Africa. We can begin by simply acknowledging the sheer distance separating the two places. As if this objective fact were not daunting enough, we cannot deny that this distance was likely all the more vast psychologically, almost to 14 chapter one the point of being unfathomable, in the days before sail-powered, compassdirected navigation emerged to provide the most advanced of all means over the almost unthinkable concept of travel by horseback or on foot between these disparate regions. Whereas the physical distance in mileage between China and Africa serves as an obvious and objective divisor for everyone, especially for Westerners with limited knowledge of either place, we must also add a subjective factor—that is, the mental distance created by the inability to penetrate the residual veneer of exoticism attached to both locations. The proclivity for succumbing to the notion of China and Africa as inherently “exotic”—and thus existing apart from our normal realm of experience—not only has the potential for veiling each locale hermetically from the other but also can lead to the stifling of earnest inquiry by inclining us summarily to preclude all possibility of conceivable interchange between the two irreducibly distinct geographical zones. Therefore, an overweening susceptibility to the influence of exoticism can result in a kind of masking or shrouding mental partition that interposes itself between us and China or Africa, thus resulting in an insurmountable mental barrier that reinforces the isolation of each place from the other, rendering them both mutually impenetrable. Surely most prominent among the conspiratorial factors that engender incredulousness at the very idea of the presence of substantial numbers of blacks in early China is empirical. It is also the most simplistic and insidious factor because it involves our incapacity to refrain from projecting the presentday situation onto the past. As any visit to China today is likely to reveal, blacks, meaning individuals of African ancestry and descent, are certainly by far the most underrepresented of all those ostensible races or ethnicities either temporarily or permanently now inhabiting the Chinese landscape. Therefore , based mainly on our observation of the paucity to near-total absence of blacks from the Chinese contemporary scene, it is quite natural to impute a comparable dearth of “blackness” back onto the past of several centuries ago. Consequently, hindsight informed by present-day realities leads us to the same conclusion with regard 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...