THE BLACKS OF PREMODERN CHINA by Don J. Wyatt ( 9780812241938 )

Item Details

Title:

THE BLACKS OF PREMODERN CHINA

By:

Don J. Wyatt

Format:

Hardback

List price:

£62.00

Our price:

£52.70

Discount:

15% off

You save:

£9.30

ISBN 10:

0812241932

ISBN 13:

9780812241938

Availability:

Usually dispatched within 1-3 weeks.

Delivery rates

Stock:

Currently 0 available

Publisher:

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

Pub. date:

30 October, 2009

Series:

Encounters with Asia

Pages:

208

Description:

The Blacks of Premodern China describes the earliest Chinese encounters with peoples regarded as black. It focuses on the first exposure of Chinese to blacks hailing from East Africa, chiefly from today's Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, who arrived in China as slaves between the seventh and seventeenth centuries C.E.

Synopsis:

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 from the area of modern Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, gradually displaced the original Asian "blacks" in Chinese consciousness. In The Blacks of Premodern China, Don J. Wyatt presents the previously unexamined story of the earliest Chinese encounters with this succession of peoples they have historically regarded as black.A series of maritime expeditions along the East African coastline during the early fifteenth century is by far the best known and most documented episode in the story of China's premodern interaction with African blacks. Just as their Western contemporaries had, the Chinese aboard the ships that made landfall in Africa encountered peoples whom they frequently classified as savages. Yet their perceptions of the blacks they met there differed markedly from those of earlier observers at home in that there was little choice but to regard the peoples encountered as free.The premodern saga of dealings between Chinese and blacks concludes with the arrival in China of Portuguese and Spanish traders and Italian clerics with their black slaves in tow. In Chinese writings of the time, the presence of the slaves of the Europeans becomes known only through sketchy mentions of black bondservants. Nevertheless, Wyatt argues that the story of these late premodern blacks, laboring anonymously in China under their European masters, is but a more familiar extension of the previously untold story of their ancestors who toiled in Chinese servitude perhaps in excess of a millennium earlier.

Illustrations:

7 illus.

Publication:

Imprint:

University of Pennsylvania Press

Returns:

Returnable

Some other items by this author:

BATTLEFRONTS REAL AND IMAGINED

BATTLEFRONTS REAL AND IMAGINED (HB)

POLITICAL FRONTIERS, ETHNIC BOUNDARIES AND HUMAN GEOGRAPHIES IN CHINESE HISTORY