Ethnic Identity in Imperial China

An Online Sourcebook

Annotated translations of primary sources for the study of ethnicity in Chinese history, from the ancient dynasties to the nineteenth century

Future chapters

Chapter 6: Inner Asian immigrants

Chapter 7: Foreign religions

Chapter 8: “Barbarian” emperors

Chapter 9: “Han” identity

Chapter 10: The Qing empire

4.21 Jiu Tangshu (Old History of the Tang), 945

The Jiu Tangshu was the first official history of the Tang empire, compiled in 941-945 under the Later Jin dynasty (936-947) using records inherited from the Tang imperial court. The passages below are from its ethnographic chapter on the southern “Man” peoples and clearly explain the use of Kunlun as a generic label for dark-skinned Southeast Asian peoples, including the Cham.

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From the “Account of the Southern Man”:

The people [of Linyi (Champa)] are curly-haired and black-skinned. By custom, they go barefoot and smear their bodies with musk. Each day, they smear themselves and wash themselves several times….

In Linyi (Champa) and the places further south, the people are all curly-haired and black-bodied and are collectively called Kunlun.1

The kingdom of Poli (Borneo) is on an island in the sea southeast of Linyi. Its land extends over several thousand li, and one reaches it by sailing south from Jiaozhou (northern Vietnam) and passing Linyi, Funan, Chitu, and Dandan.2 Its people are all black in color and wear earrings….

The kingdom of Zhenla (Cambodia) is to the northwest of Linyi and was originally a vassal state of Funan. It belongs to the “Kunlun” kind.

  1. Note that the Jinshu also described the people of Funan as “black and curly-haired” (see source 4.20). Because the Khmers, Cham, and Malays of today are brown-skinned and have straight or wavy hair, some scholars have argued that the Southeast Asian peoples labeled as Kunlun were Negritos. However, the Chinese used “black” to refer to a range of darker skin colors, and it is also likely that the Cham and Khmers of the first millennium CE had darker skin and curlier hair than their modern descendants, whose phenotypes have been changed by extensive genetic admixture with other populations including Vietnamese and Chinese migrants. ↩︎
  2. The exact location of Dandan is unclear, but it is believed to have been on the east coast of the Malay peninsula. Some scholars identify it with Kelantan, which has also been proposed as the location of Chitu. ↩︎