Wang Linheng (1548/1556-1601/1603) was a Ming judicial official who traveled to Guangzhou in 1601 to try criminal cases. Soon afterward, he published his observations of the Lingnan region under the title Yuejian bian, so named because he believed they were equal in value to a sword worth a hundred pieces of gold. The excerpt below is from the section on “foreign barbarians” (waiyi) and includes descriptions of the Portuguese in Macau, their African slaves, and the Dutch, whose first trade mission to China arrived during Wang’s visit.

At this time, the Netherlands was fighting for its independence from the Spanish empire (which at this time was united with the Portuguese empire under a single ruler) and had begun competing with the Spanish and Portuguese for trade in Asia, often in the form of naval attacks on Spanish and Portuguese ships and colonies. The Dutch mission of 1601 attempted to trade at Macau before being driven off by the Portuguese, who captured a Dutch landing party of twenty men and later executed seventeen of them.¹ The Dutch-Portuguese War formally began the next year and lasted for sixty years, during which the Dutch East India Company (VOC) established a trading colony on Taiwan to compete with Macau. To late Ming Chinese eyes, the Dutch were unusually tall and had lighter-colored hair than the Portuguese, resulting in the nicknames “Red-haired Devils” (Hongmao gui) and “Red-haired Foreigners” (Hongmao fan).² 

Like Ye Quan, Wang Linheng took an interest in the African slaves used as divers on both Portuguese and Dutch ships, connecting them to the Kunlun slaves known from much older texts. Wang’s simultaneous distaste for and fascination with the Africans’ black bodies led him to record Chinese theories about whether Africans had black bones and whether their dark skin was a result of eating raw food. His account also reveals that some African slaves in Guangzhou were charged with crimes and tried under Chinese law, although their subsequent fates are unknown.

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The people of the western ocean have deep-set eyes and high noses, balding heads and curly beards. On their bodies they wear patterned cotton clothes that are eye-catchingly exquisite. Their language sounds like chengli gutu and is unintelligible to us.³

…  

In the past, people of the western ocean who traveled to the Central Lands and back would use the inlet (ao) in Xiangshan county as a place for mooring their ships. As soon as they had finished their business in the marketplace, we would drive them away. With the passing of time, enforcement of our laws became lax, and these people gradually gathered like a colony of ants or a hive of bees, making their nests and dens in the inlet. The authorities in charge valued the profit from their trade and could not fully prosecute them according to the law. Instead, they compromised and accommodated them, but established strict regulations against contact with the inlet in order to prevent [people of] the Central Lands from selling them rice and various other kinds of grains. This was presumably aimed at starving them so that they would naturally be unable to dwell there for long. But the barbarian (Yi) people have huge amounts of gold and coins, so anyone going to them for commerce makes a profit several tens of times the cost. Though the law was strict, it was ineffective in restricting the people. Today, [the foreigners] gathered in the inlet are said to number as many as ten thousand households, or more than a hundred thousand people. This is a festering carbuncle on our southern frontier; who knows what will happen when it finally bursts?⁴

…

There is a kind of foreigner called black devils. Their entire body is black like ink, and some say that after they die and one examines their bones, the bones too are black. They can live underwater for ten days, catching fish and prawns and eating them raw to sustain themselves. When foreign ships cross the seas, they often take one or two black devils with them to use in emergencies. One of them had been charged with a crime under Han (i.e., Ming) law and made a confession to me. His body and face were shockingly ugly. One of my attendants told me, “This devil has been locked up in prison for years and has mostly been eating cooked food, so he looks much fairer than those who have just arrived on foreign ships.” But I later heard another case in Xiangshan and saw another black devil who had been imprisoned for several years, yet his black skin was shiny enough to use as a mirror. It does not appear, then, that there is any correlation to eating cooked food.

In the ninth month of the xinchou year (1601), two barbarian ships arrived at the Xiangshan inlet, and even our interpreters did not know which country they were from. People called them Red-haired Devils. These people have all-red beards and hair and round eyes. They stand at a height of about one zhang (about 10 feet).⁵ Their ships are extremely large and wrapped on the outside of the hull with copper sheets. They have a draft of two zhang (about 20 feet). The barbarians of the Xiangshan inlet, worrying that they would try to seize the inlet for purposes of trade, chased them away with their troops. After their ships moved out to the open ocean, they were blown away by strong winds and no one knows where they went.

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1. See also Leonard Blussé, “Brief Encounter at Macao,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988), 647-664. This article presents an excellent analysis of the incident, but unfortunately misreads Wang Linheng’s name as Linxiang (Lin-hsiang) due to the similarity of the characters 亨 and 享. ↩︎
2. See Lennert Gesterkamp, “Red-Haired Barbarians: The Dongxi Yangkao (1617) and its Portrayal of the Dutch in China,” in Thijs Weststeijn ed., Foreign Devils and Philosophers: Cultural Encounters between the Chinese, the Dutch, and Other Europeans, 1590-1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 57-81. ↩︎
3. Chengli gutu is the Chinese transliteration of a Xiongnu-language phrase recorded in the Shiji, purportedly meaning “Son of Heaven.” Chengli corresponds to Tengri, the chief deity of the Turkic and Mongol peoples. Gutu probably corresponds to the Turkic kutlugh and Mongolic kutugh, both meaning “blessing” or “good fortune.” Here, Wang Linheng simply uses these Inner Asian words to indicate a foreign language that sounds like gibberish to him. ↩︎
4. Wang Linheng’s implicit message is that the Portuguese in Macau may eventually pose a security threat. Another passage in his book show that his favored strategy for preempting this threat was to give the Dutch another inlet to use as a trading base, thus increasing the profit to the Ming while forcing the two rival “barbarian” peoples to guard against each other rather than threaten the Ming. Wang proposed this strategy to the governor of Guangdong, who was quite receptive to it, but the Dutch fleet left before anything could be done to implement it. For a translation of the relevant passage, see Blussé, “Brief Encounter at Macao,” 660-661. ↩︎
5. This is, of course, a gross exaggeration. ↩︎