Why read The Blacks of Premodern China?

Book cover of The Blacks of Premodern China

Book description

Premodern Chinese described a great variety of the peoples they encountered as "black." The earliest and most frequent of these encounters were with their Southeast Asian neighbors, specifically the Malayans. But by the midimperial times of the seventh through seventeenth centuries C.E., exposure to peoples from Africa, chiefly slaves arriving…

Explore

Topics

Genres

Asian history

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

1 author picked The Blacks of Premodern China as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Geraldine Heng

Author

Everyone knows about how the People’s Republic of China treats Tibetans and Uighurs today, but how many know about premodern China’s response to people it considered foreign, barbarian, or Black? Don Wyatt’s book shows how people in Southeast Asia—Sumatra, Java, the Malay archipelago—were considered by China as Black, alongside actual Africans. An excellent companion book to read together with this is Shao-yun Yang’s The Way of the Barbarians: Redrawing Ethnic Boundaries in Tang and Song China. Many books on race before the modern era focus on the West, but how about race elsewhere? How about China, a country that’s…

From Geraldine's list on race before the modern era.