During the Manchu conquest of Ming China, Qu Dajun (1630-1696), then a teenager, participated in the Ming loyalist defense of his native city Guangzhou. After Guangzhou’s fall to the Qing, he became a monk and traveled throughout the country while secretly continuing his involvement with Ming loyalist forces. The last Ming loyalist bastion on Taiwan surrendered in 1683; Qu then returned to Guangzhou and devoted the rest of his life to writing and scholarship. He was an accomplished poet and scholar, but the Ming loyalist sentiments expressed in his works led the Qing imperial court to ban and destroy them in the eighteenth century. Fortunately, several of them were recovered or reconstructed in the nineteenth century.

Qu Dajun’s Guangdong xinyu is a local history of his home region of Guangdong (also known as Lingnan or Yuè 粵), including chapters on topics such as climate, geography, local deities, food, material culture, and flora and fauna. The passage translated below is from a section titled “Black people” (heiren 黑人) in the chapter on “human beings.” In it, Qu draws freely on earlier accounts of dark-skinned people but also attempts to link them to black slaves from Siam (Thailand) that he had encountered in Guangzhou. For Qu’s impressions of African slaves in the Portuguese colony of Macau, which are found in another part of the book, see source 4.34.

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In the Linyi ji, there is a mention of the Dan’er people, who regard blackness as beautiful. The Lisao speaks of a Dark Country, and that is today’s Danzhou (in Hainan).¹ This land was situated in the great sea, and its people were like fish and soft-shelled turtles.² Fish and soft-shelled turtles have an innate nature based on fire and they like the color black. Water is black in color. The people of Dan’er were watery creatures as well, and so they liked blackness. However, Danzhou has now been transformed to follow Hua customs, and its people certainly no longer have bodies with pierced ears hanging down to the shoulders and tattooed cheeks.³ Only the foreign peoples of Xianluo (Siam) and Manlajia (Malacca) dye their faces with drugs to make them black, their customs still being similar to those of Dan’er in ancient times. One of my poems has a line, “In the south seas, there are many Dark Countries/In the western ocean, half the people are black,” which is a reference to this.

In Guangzhou’s heyday, many of the wealthy households bought black people to guard their doors. They were called “devil slaves” or “black servant boys.” They were as black as ink. Their lips were red and their teeth white, and their hair was curly and yellow. They lived on islands beyond the sea and ate raw food. When they were first captured and fed with cooked food, they would suffer diarrhea for days. [The slave traders] called this “changing their guts.” Some died from this, but those that survived could be kept. After being kept for a long time, they became able to understand human speech, but they were unable to speak it themselves. They were extremely strong and could bear loads of several hundred catties. They were innocent by nature and would not try to escape, but their tastes were incomprehensible to us. They were also called “wild people.” One kind of these that could dive underwater were called Kunlun slaves.⁴

One account says, “The Dragon Households (longhu) dwell in Dan’er; their people have green eyes and can swim underwater for one to two days. They are also known as Kunlun slaves.”⁵ In Tang times, many great clans of high status kept such slaves. There was a prefect of Nanhai who once gifted to Tao Xian a Kunlun slave named Mohe who was brave and strong and good at swimming and diving in water.⁶ During the Yongle era, the eastern king and western king of the country of Suoluo sent envoys to our court and presented black servant boys as tribute items; they were also of this kind.⁷

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There are people called “slave boys” (nuzai) who come from Xianluo (Siam) …. Some are enslaved as “slave boys” for committing a crime. Wealthy elite families and chiefs own up to several hundred “slave boys,” and some merchants from Yuè (Guangdong) have bought them and taken them to Guangzhou. They all have black skin and deep-set eyes. After much time has passed, they too are able to speak the Yuè language (Cantonese).

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1. See source 4.19. ↩︎
2. This alludes to Jia Juanzhi’s denigrating description of the people of Hainan; see source 2.4. ↩︎
3. Han-period sources describe the people of Dan’er as practicing ear stretching (by means of heavy earrings) and facial tattooing. ↩︎
4. This entire passage is adapted from the Pingzhou ketan (see source 4.26), probably via one of Qu Dajun’s main sources, the Guangdong tongzhi (see source 4.32). ↩︎
5. Qu Dajun appears to be loosely quoting the Tangyin guiqian (Tenth Volume of Studies on Tang Poetry), a poetry commentary by Hu Zhenheng (1569-1645). In Chapter 18 of that text, Hu glosses the term Dragon Households in a Tang-era poem by Han Yu, writing: “The Dragon Households dwell in Dan’er and Zhuya. Their people’s eyes are all green. They are good at swimming and are presumably the so-called Kunlun slaves.” ↩︎
6. See source 4.23. ↩︎
7. “Suoluo” 娑羅 is a transcriber’s error that probably originates from the Guangdong tongzhi (see source 4.32). Ming records actually name this country as Poluo 婆羅 (Brunei). ↩︎