Ye Quan (1522-1578) was a highly learned Ming literatus who traveled around north and south China and compiled his observations into the Xianbo bian (The Worthy Gambler’s Collection). The You Lingnan lu is an account of Ye’s visit to the Lingnan region, including Macau, in 1565, and was published as an addendum to the Xianbo bian.

The Portuguese seaborne empire was the first of the early modern European colonial powers to make contact with the Ming court. Portuguese ships first arrived off the coast of south China in 1517, but a series of diplomatic missteps and naval clashes prevented Portugal from gaining Ming recognition as a tributary state. The Portuguese then turned to participating in the rampant smuggling and piracy along the southern coast. In 1554, local authorities in Guangdong finally granted them permission to trade legally on the condition of paying customs duties; this was followed by the leasing of a permanent settlement at an inlet on the coast of Xiangshan county. The new Portuguese colony (Macau) thrived by serving as a middleman for Chinese trade with Japan, Europe, and (after 1571) Spanish Manila and Mexico; it also served as a language training center and staging point for Jesuit missions to China. A less savory aspect of the colony was the Portuguese practice of buying Chinese children (many of them kidnapped illegally) for use as servants or slaves. This human trafficking gave rise to lurid rumors, reported in numerous Ming texts, that the Portuguese ate children.

The excerpts below show that Ye Quan found the fashion, manners, and religion of the Portuguese quite fascinating, although Christian iconography was perplexing to him. His distaste toward the African slaves in Macau forms a stark contrast to his sympathy for enslaved Chinese children who served the Portuguese, as well as his curiosity toward the Portuguese themselves. It suggests that prejudiced perceptions of black bodies had become ingrained in Chinese minds, perhaps due to entrenched associations of blackness with slavery.

Ye Quan’s account of the Portuguese and their slaves has also been partially translated and insightfully analyzed in Qiong Zhang, Making the New World Their Own: Chinese Encounters with Jesuit Science in the Age of Discovery (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 285–290.

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The people living in the barbarian houses [in Macau] are all from Folangji, a country in the great western ocean.¹ These people are fair-skinned and clean-complexioned, with shaved heads and hairy beards. They have high noses, long eyebrows low on their foreheads, and aquamarine eyes. They wear red hats, jackets, and pants, all made of scarlet cloth. Some of these are decorated with colorful silk thread embroidery of plum flowers and the eight treasures, all bright-colored and beautiful. They wear boots that are curved for the comfort of the feet. They wear soft leather gloves over their palms. Sometimes they hold rosaries in their left hands and a walking staff in their right. When it gets slightly cold, they wear felt hats and coats that look like a Buddhist monk’s robe.

The rich ones wear red scarlet jackets with burgundy-rimmed colors and drape gold chains over their chests; they have rings set with gems from the western ocean; they perfume their bodies with fragrant oils. From their belts hang daggers one foot long, decorated with gold and silver; the blades are slightly blackish and are poisoned. Each is accompanied by four or five black slaves carrying a vermilion parasol and long-handled swords. The steel in these swords is flexible enough to be bent and return to its original shape upon being let go. Even the poor and slaves among them are dressed colorfully. Only in mourning do they wear long black robes and wear black hats, dressing in no other color. The women are even fairer in complexion and have long flowing tresses, which they wrap with a piece of cloth or embroidered brocade. They wear gold earrings and leather shoes. A large cloth or embroidered brocade hangs from the top of the head down to the floor, exposing only their faces and some metallic ornaments. The men greet others by doffing their hats and half-kneeling, while the women curtsey in a fashion similar to that of the Central Lands.

They worship the Buddha most devoutly.² Their foreign writing reads sideways, and their language has lots of tongue-rolling, sounding like bird calls. Every three to five days, they go to their worship hall, where a foreign monk gives a sermon on karma.³ They sometimes sit and sometimes get up, sometimes stand straight and sometimes lean on their chairs, and after some time, some of them start tearing up and sighing. The image of the god they worship has, hanging in the middle, a naked man carved of sandalwood, six to seven inches long. He hangs, his four limbs splayed out, with nails through his hands and feet. They say that their ancestor was wicked and suffered this ordeal. It must be that in a past age, they used this punishment to transform their foolish customs and curb their violent ways. Beneath it is a wooden panel divided into nine parts. The upper three have the image of [an old man] who looks like Laozi. The middle three depict their ancestor when he was a baby being cared for by his mother. The lower three depict his married life, with a beautiful woman crouching and embracing a naked man and doing who knows what.⁴

…

They have black devils (heigui 黑鬼) working for them. The country they come from is poor, and many of its people become slaves to the Folangji. They have a fierce and vicious appearance, with curly-haired beards that look like the wool of sheep in the barbarian lands. Their skin is black like ink, and their feet and toes are broad and big and especially scary. Seawater is bitter and foul-tasting, and when people of the Central Lands fall into it, they die in an instant. But the black devils can sit underwater for a whole day and retrieve an item dropped into the water as if it were on dry land. I suspect that the black boys used [as servants] in officials’ households under the Yuan and the three hundred black slaves presented as tribute from the Western Regions at the beginning of our dynasty were all of this type.⁵

They also bring [slave] women to this island whose color is just like the men’s. They apply red powder to their foreheads, which makes them look even uglier and more shameless. But they are quite able at commercial transactions with [people of] the Central Lands.

One day, I was at a foreigner’s home and saw a six or seven-year-old boy crying. I asked the translator, “Was he born to these foreigners?” He said, “No. He was kidnapped from Dongguan and sold this year. He is crying because he misses his parents.” The foreigners keep up to five or six such boys in their homes, and with girls it can go up to ten or more. They all have similar stories. The boys wear the clothes they originally had, while the girls gather their hair at the back and cover it with a white cloth. They wear a blouse made of western ocean cotton and a cotton skirt. They have no undergarments and go barefoot; that is all they wear even in the cold of the twelfth lunar month. On this island, there are no fewer than several thousand boys and girls serving as the barbarians’ (Yi) servants or concubines, and all are from good (i.e., free commoner) families in the Central Lands. How terrible and lamentable!

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1. The Ming and Qing Chinese knew the Portuguese, and eventually also the Spanish in Manila, as Folangji, a term derived from the Persian farangī (“Franks”). ↩︎
2. Ye Quan misinterprets the Catholicism of the Portuguese as a form of Buddhism. ↩︎
3. What follows is an attempt at describing a church service that Ye Quan evidently witnessed. ↩︎
4. The top image depicts God the Father, the middle image the Virgin and Child. The bottom image described was evidently a pietà, a Catholic devotional image of the Virgin Mary cradling Jesus’s body after his death on the cross. Ye Quan, not understanding the context, misreads it as a sexually lewd image. ↩︎
5. On “black boys” in the Yuan, see source 4.27. According to Ming records, three hundred black slaves were presented to the Ming court as tribute from Java (not “the Western Regions” in Central Asia) in 1381. ↩︎