The Guangdong tongzhi is an official gazetteer of Guangdong province compiled in 1599-1602 by an editorial team led by the retired official Guo Fei (1529-1605), a native of Guangzhou. The first excerpt below recounts the same first contact with the Dutch that Wang Linheng recorded (see source 4.31). The editors attempt to link the “Red-haired Devils” with an imaginary country of red-haired Rakshasa ogres mentioned in some Tang sources. The second excerpt is on black-skinned slaves, but the editors rely heavily on the Song-period Pingzhou ketan and the Tang story of Tao Xian’s Kunlun slave, indicating that they had less access to information about the African slaves in Macau and Guangzhou than Wang Linheng did. This passage in turn served as one of the sources for Qu Dajun’s section on “Black people” in the Guangdong xinyu (see source 4.28).

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We do not know which country the Red-haired Devils come from. In the winter of the twenty-ninth year of the Wanli era (1601), a large ship suddenly arrived at Haojing (Macau). The people on it were all dressed in red, and their eyebrows, hair, and beards were all red. Their feet, from the heels to the toes, measured one chi and two cun (about 1.25 feet); they were much taller and larger than normal people. They seemed more fearsome than the barbarians in the inlet (i.e., Portuguese). We repeatedly interrogated them, and they said, through an interpreter, that they would not dare to engage in piracy and merely wanted to present tribute.¹ …. The barbarians in the inlet guarded it together and refused to let them come ashore. Only then did they leave. We later heard that Manlajia (Malacca) waited for their returning ships and ambushed them, killing them all.²

We note: To the east of Poli (Borneo) there is a Luocha (Rakshasa) country. Its people are extremely ugly, with vermilion-colored hair, black bodies, beast-like fangs, and claws like eagle talons. They sometimes trade with the people of Linyi (Champa), but the trading is done at night and they cover their faces. Their country produces fire pearls that look like crystal. At midday, they use the pearl to capture the sun’s image and project it onto mugwort, which then catches fire. This is found in the Tangshu (History of the Tang).³

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The devil slaves are black servant boys in the foreign (Fan 畨) countries. The wealthy households of Guangzhou keep many devil slaves; these are extremely strong and can bear loads of several hundred catties.⁴ Their language is unintelligible to us, nor can we understand their tastes. They are simple-minded by nature and do not try to escape. We also call them “wild people.” Their skin color is as black as ink, their lips are red and their teeth white, and their hair is curly and yellow. There are male and female ones and they live on islands beyond the sea.

They eat their food raw, and when they are first enslaved and fed with cooked food, they suffer diarrhea for days. [The slave traders] call this “changing their guts.” Some die from this, but those that survive can be kept. After being kept for a long time, they become able to understand human speech, but they are unable to speak it themselves.

One kind of “wild people” lives near the sea. They can swim underwater without closing their eyes and are called Kunlun slaves. In Tang times, many elite clans kept them. [Translator’s note: The editors go on to quote the Ganze yao story “Tao Xian” (see source 4.23) verbatim.] …

In the fourth year of the Yongle era (1405), the eastern king and western king of the country of Soluo⁵ each sent an envoy to our court and presented black servant boys as tribute items.

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1. This refers to twenty men from the Dutch fleet whom the Portuguese in Macau captured when they attempted to land in boats. Ming officials questioned them through an interpreter, but the Portuguese disrupted the interrogation so as to prevent the Dutch from establishing trade relations with China; the Portuguese later executed seventeen of the Dutchmen and sent the remaining three to their colony in Goa. See the detailed analysis in Leonard Blussé, “Brief Encounter at Macao,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988), 647-664. ↩︎
2. This report is inaccurate, as the VOC fleet under the command of Jacob Van Neck returned safely to Holland, blaming the Chinese for the detention of twenty of their number and unaware that the Portuguese were the ones to blame. ↩︎
3. This description of the Rakshasa country is actually from the Tang huiyao (Tang State Compendium), though other versions can be found in the Sui-Tang jiahua (see source 4.8) and the Tongdian (see source 2.13). But the Taiping yulan section on pearls quotes it and attributes it to the Tangshu (i.e., Jiu Tangshu), so the Guangdong tongzhi editors presumably found it in the Taiping yulan. The Tang court apparently knew of this country only through an embassy from Linyi (Champa) that presented a “fire pearl” as tribute in 630, claiming that it came from the Rakshasa country. The earliest extant account of this embassy is in the Sui-Tang jiahua: “At the beginning of the Zhenguan era (627-649), Linyi presented a fire pearl as tribute. It looked like crystal, and they said that they had obtained it from the Rakshasa country. The people of that country have vermilion-colored hair, black bodies, beast-like fangs, and claws like eagle talons.” ↩︎
4. Nearly all of the content for this description of “devil slaves” is copied from the Pingzhou ketan (see source 4.26). ↩︎
5. Suoluo 娑羅 is a mistranscription of Poluo 婆羅, a name used for Brunei in the Ming. ↩︎