Zhang Xie (1574-1640) was a prodigy who passed the provincial stage of the civil service examinations at the age of twenty. Disheartened by the deadly factional conflicts in late Ming politics, he chose a private life of writing and scholarship over government service. His Dongxiyang kao is a comprehensive ethnography of Southeast Asian countries, as well as Japan and Taiwan, including landmarks, local products, and trading practices. The following excerpts are from a section on the Spanish Philippines (known to the Ming as Lüsong [Luzon]) and a section on Dutch traders in Southeast Asia. When describing the facial features and red hair of the Dutch, Zhang attempts to trace their ancestry to the Central Asian Wusun people based on a description in Yan Shigu’s commentary to the Hanshu (see source 4.12).

For Lennert Gesterkamp’s full translations of the Dongxiyang kao section on the Dutch and a later poem on the Dutch by Zhang Xie, see Thijs Weststeijn ed., Foreign Devils and Philosophers: Cultural Encounters between the Chinese, the Dutch, and Other Europeans, 1590-1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 304-308, 310-311. The translation here is my own.

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The Folangji are seven chi (about 7.15 feet) tall. Their eyes are like a cat’s, their mouths are like an oriole’s, and their faces are as white as ash.¹ Their beards are curly like black yarn, and their hair is nearly red…. They are extremely greedy by nature and travel to every country, plotting to attack as soon as they arrive. That is how Lüsong (Luzon) and Manlajia (Malacca) have changed rulers.² The ones in Lüsong originally attacked and conquered Poluo (Borneo). The people of Poluo put poison in the water to kill them, so they fled to Lüsong.³ Those at Xiangshan county (i.e., Macau) in the Central Lands have occupied it for quite a long time now. Now they are “neither horse nor donkey”⁴ and are as strong as an iron-walled city, dominating the inlet….

The Red-haired Foreigners call their country Helan (Holland). It is next to Folangji and has not had contact with the Central Lands of the Hua since ancient times. Its people have deep eyes and long noses and their hair is all red. That is why they are called Red-haired Foreigners. (Yan Shigu wrote: “[The Wusun] were the most unusual in appearance among the barbarians (Rong) of the Western Regions. Among the Hu people of today, the ones who have blue eyes and red beards and look like macaques are all descended from their kind.”⁵) … Because the Central Lands are too distant and inaccessible, they covet lands closer by. They once went to Lüsong, but the people of Lüsong turned them away and refused to admit them. Then they went to Xiangshan and were blocked by the barbarians of the inlet. They returned [to their country] and have been like wolves divining [for prey] for years now.⁶ …

They have servants called “black devils” who jump into the sea from a great height, and then emerge slowly from the water to walk among the waves as if on level ground.

[Translator’s note: The next passage in the text gives a narrative of Ming admiral Shen Yourong’s (1557-1628) success in evicting the Dutch from the Pescadores islands in 1604, and then describes the formidable Dutch warships.]

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1. Compare this to a description of the people of Melaka (Malacca) earlier in the text: “Their skin is as black as lacquer, but some among them are white-skinned, and those are [immigrant] Hua people.” Zhang Xie thus saw both the Chinese and the Portuguese as white-skinned but regarded the Portuguese as unnaturally pale. ↩︎
2. Malacca was conquered by the Portuguese in 1511 and Luzon was conquered by the Spanish in 1570-1571. ↩︎
3. This is an inaccurate account of the Spanish invasion of Brunei in 1578. The Spanish expedition initially succeeded, but was forced to pull out and return to Manila after suffering an outbreak of cholera or dysentery. ↩︎
4. This alludes to a story in the Hanshu about a king of the Central Asian state of Kucha, who visited the Han capital and was so impressed by its grandeur that he tried to imitate Chinese court clothing and ceremonial in his own kingdom. His people and those of neighboring states mocked him, saying he was now neither a horse nor a donkey but a mule (i.e., a strange hybrid creature). Zhang Xie’s use of the allusion implies that the Portuguese at Macau have adopted some Chinese ways. ↩︎
5. See source 4.12. ↩︎
6. According to Chinese lore, the wolf first uses divination to locate its prey before beginning to hunt. ↩︎