Little is known about the life of Zhu Yu (fl. 1102-1148), the author of the notebook (biji) Pingzhou ketan. Several of the entries in the text describe the maritime trade, merchant ships, and foreign merchant communities of Guangzhou, which he observed firsthand when his father served as an official in the port city around 1101-1102. The passage below gives an exceptionally detailed account of the “black” slaves owned by Chinese households and merchants in Guangzhou, some of whom were apparently still known to the Chinese as Kunlun and valued primarily for their diving abilities. Other varieties of “devil slaves,” possibly from Melanesia, were prized for their great physical strength.

For another annotated translation of this source, by Don Wyatt, see https://medievalslavery.org/east-asia-and-pacific/foreign-slaves-of-guangzhou

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The wealthy households of Guangzhou keep many devil slaves (guinu 鬼奴¹); these are extremely strong and can bear loads of several hundred catties. 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.² There are male and female ones³ 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 eyes⁴ and are called Kunlun slaves….

When a ship suddenly springs a leak, [its crew] cannot enter [the flooded area] to repair it.⁵ Instead, they get a devil slave to take a knife and cotton fiber (caulking) and seal the leak from outside.  The devil slaves are good at swimming and can go underwater without closing their eyes.

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1. In Cantonese, guinu is pronounced as gwáinòuh. On the Cantonese custom of using “devil” as a derisive label for foreigners, see the Wikipedia entry for Gweilo. ↩︎
2. The mention of curly yellow hair suggests an origin from Melanesia (e.g., New Guinea), where blond or light-colored hair naturally occurs with black skin. This may indicate the enslavement of Papuans by “Kunlun” merchants from what is now Indonesia, and their transportation to Guangzhou for sale to the Chinese, though such a trade is unattested in extant sources. Other scholars have suggested that the light hair is a symptom of kwashiorkor (severe protein malnutrition), but I find this unlikely given the earlier observation on the slaves’ great strength. ↩︎
3. The terms here, pin and mu, were usually used for male and female animals, not human beings. ↩︎
4. This ability has been observed in the Moken people of the Mergui archipelago, whose way of life relies heavily on freediving. They may have been among the peoples sold to the Chinese as “Kunlun slaves.” ↩︎
5. This probably refers to Song Chinese shipbuilders’ use of bulkheads and watertight compartments to contain flooding, which is also described in the Pingzhou ketan. ↩︎