The brilliant Zhao Yi (1727-1814) rose from poverty and hardship to become a celebrated scholar, respected especially for his innovative approaches to poetry and historical analysis. He served as an official in Beijing, Guangxi, Yunnan, Guangdong, and Guizhou before retiring early in 1772 to devote his time to scholarship and writing. The Yanpu zaji is a compilation of his observations and knowledge on a wide range of subjects, completed toward the end of his life. The passage below records his impressions of Europeans and Africans in Guangzhou and Macau, which were presumably formed when he served as Prefect of Guangzhou in 1770-1771, but also (as with earlier writers) influenced by the Tang image of the Kunlun slave. Like Cai Ruxian in the sixteenth century (see source 4.30), Zhao Yi mentions marriages between Cantonese women and African slaves at Guangzhou, but he differs from Cai in asserting that the offspring of such marriages are only black in their bones.

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Guangdong is a gathering place for various foreign peoples beyond the sea. There are white foreigners and black foreigners, and the people of Yue 粤 (Guangdong) call them White Devils (bai guizi 白鬼子) and Black Devils 黑鬼子 (hei guizi). The white ones have a slightly reddish complexion, but their eyebrows and hair are all white. Even the young men have hair as white as frost and snow.¹ The black ones have black eyebrows and hair, and their faces are also black but slightly lighter in shade than the eyebrows and hair, like diluted ink. The white ones are the masters and the black ones are the slaves, and their superior and inferior statuses are fixed from birth. The black slaves have exceedingly loyal and honest natures and are also strong. They can dive into water to retrieve objects, and if their master orders them to dive into the sea, they will do it even in the face of jiao dragons and snakes. The people known in ancient times as Mohe² and Black Kunlun were presumably of this kind.

A certain family bought a black slave and gave him a Yue (Cantonese) slave girl as his wife. He had a son by her, and some teased him, saying, “You are a black devil, so your son should be black. But now your son is white, so the father must be another man!” The black slave did become suspicious and killed his son by cutting his shin with a knife. But the shin bone turned out to be pure black, so the slave was overcome with sorrow. Only then did he realize that the bones come from the father while the muscles and flesh follow the mother’s body.³

There is also a kind of “Red Barbarian” (hongyi 紅夷) with white faces but red eyebrows and hair, hence they are called Red-haired Barbarians. Their country is called Helan (Holland).

Aomen (the “inlet gate,” i.e., Macau) in Xiangshan county has long been leased as a residence by foreign barbarians (Fan-Yi 番夷), and our dynasty has established a Vice Prefect to supervise its defense. The foreigners have their homes in the inlet but make a living from maritime trade on their ships. Their women have the finest weaving skills, but they are unwilling to marry into other families and only allow men to marry into their families.⁴ The [Chinese] people of Xiangshan can speak the foreigners’ languages, so those among them who covet profit often marry into their families in this way.

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1. This probably refers to the eighteenth-century Euro-American elite custom of powdered wigs. ↩︎
2. Referring to the story of Tao Xian and his Kunlun slave Mohe: see source 4.23. ↩︎
3. The notion that black-skinned people have black bones can already be seen in Wang Linheng’s Yuejian bian (see source 4.31). ↩︎
4. This seems to repeat a claim first made in Qu Dajun’s Guangdong xinyu (see source 4.34). ↩︎