The Ming official Cai Ruxian (1533-1594) compiled the Dongyi tushuo during his term as Provincial Administrative Commissioner in Guangdong from 1583 to 1589. It is an illustrated gazetteer of foreign countries that interacted with the Ming via maritime trade, including Korea, Japan, the Ryukyu kingdom, the Portuguese colonies in Macau and Malacca, the Spanish colony in Manila, and various Southeast Asian and South Asian states. The last item in the gazetteer describes the African “black devils” who served the Portuguese as slaves. In the text’s Introduction, Cai explains that although the black devils are “the lowest of the low” (weihu wei 微乎微) and don’t really have a kingdom of their own, he lists them after all the other “barbarians” so as to acknowledge that they, too, are creatures of this world (“living between heaven and earth”). Cai appears to have seen some African slave-soldiers whom a Ming general in Guangzhou bought from the Portuguese, but his description of the “black devils” was mostly based on second-hand information and hearsay rather than first-hand observation, and some of it clearly comes from Zhu Yu’s Pingzhou ketan (see source 4.26). The most intriguing part of Cai’s account is the mention of African slaves who married Chinese women and had children with them, perhaps after being freed in return for military service. Despite his statement about the slaves’ base status, he also seems to have been more willing to recognize their positive qualities (honesty, loyalty, and courage) than Ye Quan had been twenty years earlier (see source 4.29).

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The black devils (heigui 黑鬼) are black foreign devils (hei fangui 黑番鬼), and are also called devil slaves (guinu 鬼奴). Their language and tastes are unintelligible to us, but they are honest and guileless by nature, and are good at defending their masters. Their color is black like ink, their eyes are round, their hair is curly and yellow, and there are male and female ones. They live on islands in the sea and eat raw and rancid food. If you give them human flesh, they will eat it raw. If you feed them cooked food, they suffer diarrhea, but if they survive this, then they are easy to keep. They are extremely strong and one man can bear loads of several hundred catties. In battle, they have no fear of death; they can survive one to two days underwater. I have seen a general buy them to use as shock troops, at a rather high price. When given Hua wives, they sire children who are also black. After being kept for a long time, they become able to understand human speech, but they are unable to speak it themselves. They are used as slaves by the barbarians (Yi), like the slaves and servants of the Central Lands. Some say that they are braver than the white foreign devils (i.e., Europeans).