2
During the nineteenth century, a new social environment was shaped in China by a multitude of factors. Population growth, social dislocation, popular rebellions, administrative fragmentation and political crises combined to create a pattern of internal decline. Foreign intrusions from the Opium War (1839–42) onwards further weakened the Qing.
The arrival of Westerners in the first half of the nineteenth century also impinged upon pre-existing tensions between various trends of Confucianism. In the eighteenth century, discontent with imperial orthodoxy among Qing scholars led to the flourishing of an alternative school of thought that emphasised evidential research (kaozhengxue) at the expense of philosophical speculation.1 This school attacked the dominant Neo-Confucian ideology and hoped to reconstruct original Confucianism as formulated by the sage-kings of antiquity. Encouraged by the Jesuits’ introduction of modern science during the late Ming and early Qing, the evidential research movement was also characterised by a concern with precise scholarship and practical matters. It was interested in linguistics, astronomy, mathematics, geography and epigraphy. The assault of evidential research on Neo-Confucian orthodoxy would lead to the theoretical rejection of the entire Confucian legacy during the New Culture Movement at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The evidential research movement also set the stage for the social and political conclusions drawn by the New Text movement.2 The revival of former Han New Text Confucianism in the eighteenth century led to the forging of an ideological framework for statecraft reform at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Well before the first Opium War, New Text scholars were seeking pragmatic solutions to organisational breakdown in the empire.
Seen from the perspective of these scholarly developments, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were an age of profound transition for the Confucian world. The intrusion of the West increased existing tensions between different schools of thought and accelerated the deliquescence of the Confucian tradition as a whole. The presence of Europeans, supported by military strength, economic power and organisational ability, confronted the Confucian elite with a divergent symbolic universe. By their very existence, they demonstrated that the Confucian worldview was purely relative. Chinese scholars increasingly discovered that the Confucian universe in which they operated was neither total nor absolute. Thus reform-minded scholars from Wei Yuan (1794–1856) to Kang Youwei (1858–1927) responded both to developments of particular schools of thought within the Confucian world and to the confrontation of this tradition as a whole with the West.
It would be arbitrary to assign a date to the confrontation of imperial cosmology with a Christian universe. There was never a ‘clash’ between China and the West, only a gradual phenomenon of interaction. As a concession to periodisation, one could tentatively consider the Macartney mission to the Qianlong court in 1793 as a point of departure. The failure of the British mission was partly due to divergent visions of court ritual. Imperial cosmology, for instance, emphasised a social hierarchy in which foreign powers had to pay tribute to the emperor, whereas Europeans stressed the values of openness and equality.3 Naito Konan, a leading sinologist at the beginning of the twentieth century, also began his analysis of the racial issue in late imperial China with the Macartney mission.4
The threat posed by Western military and economic power during the nineteenth century was significant, though it never amounted to a process of colonisation. The military dimension comprised a series of short but violent campaigns that resulted in two treaties. At the end of the first ‘Opium War’, the treaty of Nanjing ceded a barren island called Hong Kong to Britain and opened five ports to British residence and trade. The privileges granted to foreign powers in this treaty (mainly extraterritoriality, an indemnity, taxation rights and most-favoured-nation treatment) were based on concessions made to the Khan of Kokand in Xinjiang between 1831 and 1835.5 The Nanjing agreement was thus part of a general change in frontier policy initiated by the Qing as well as the result of an unequal treaty exacted by foreign imperialism. The Anglo-French invasion and the second treaty settlement (1857–60) enlarged the scope and nature of foreign activities in China and opened most of the empire to Western contact. Two decades later, the French took Vietnam, China’s principal tributary in the south. Foreign military threats, however, never matched the intensity, scope and duration of China’s internal military challenges, such as the Taiping war (1850–64), described as the most destructive war in the nineteenth century, with casualties of at least twenty million. The economic impact of the West, on the other hand, was diffuse. Some historians, in reaction to overstated claims about ‘economic imperialism’, have described it as ‘a flea in the elephant’s ear’.6 Others have shown how Chinese merchants benefited from the transport and banking facilities provided by foreign companies and developed their enterprises in symbiosis with European partners.
The development of racial categorisations during the nineteenth century, however, was due in large part to internal developments. Pamela Kyle Crossley has convincingly demonstrated that a sense of identity through descent became important to the Qing court in the eighteenth century. By the Qianlong period (1736–95), the Manchu court was progressively turning towards a rigid taxonomy of culturally distinct ‘races’ (zu) within China. The reasons for this increasingly racial orientation are complex, as Crossley’s article on the Chinese martial banners demonstrates. In short, as the cultural identity of the Manchus started eroding after nearly a century of settlement in China, blood ties became increasingly important to maintain their status as conquerors and enforce legal segregation against the Chinese population. Genealogy and blood replaced Manchu language, martial culture and north-eastern religion, all of which were in apparent decline. The promotion of ‘race’ as a taxonomic element had some roots in the caste system of the Liao (907–1125) and Yuan (1260–1368) dynasties, but overall it was new to the Qing policies of the late eighteenth century.7
Besides the court’s concern with racial categorisation, it has also been noted that ethnic prejudice permeated different levels of society during the first half of the nineteenth century. According to Mark Elliott, whose research focuses on nineteenth-century Jiangnan, ethnic rivalry and prejudice existed well before the Opium War.8 The threshold for the articulation of ethnic hostilities was the Taiping war, which was derived partly from Hakka-Punti hostility. The anti-Manchu arguments that had been developed by Ming loyalists during the seventeenth century struck a popular chord with the Taiping.9 They were also influenced by heterodox religions, mainly millenarian Buddhism and Protestant Christianity.
Despite these developments there was no systematic, recognisable discourse of ‘race’ in China until the 1890s. What existed were at best vague categorisations or defensive stereotypes, only indirectly comparable to European racial ideas of the first half of the nineteenth century. Before Darwin, Europeans divided mankind into several permanent racial types, each of which was believed to have existed without change since its creation on earth.10 Although such typology can be found in an embryonic form in nineteenth-century China, it never achieved a significant level of theorisation. The word ‘type’ is used here rather as a synonym for stereotype, or the simplified image which a given social group has about outsiders.
Before we look at these racial images it is important to bear in mind that only a section of the governing elite felt compelled to reduce outsiders to manageable stereotypes. How ordinary people reacted or participated in the formulation of this imagery is an important question which still remains to be investigated. It may be hypothesised, however, that a certain degree of reciprocal influence existed between elite and popular culture. Whereas the governing elites could appropriate ideas formulated at a popular level, it is equally plausible that the racial imagery found in official texts filtered down the social hierarchy. It would be more fruitful to describe relations between elite culture and popular culture as a phenomenon of circularity,11 or constant interaction, rather than as one of strict autarchy. Furthermore, as Berger and Luckmann have pointed out, the coexistence of a more or less naive mythology at a popular level with a more sophisticated cosmology among the elite often serves to maintain the same symbolic universe.12
Demonology
A common historical response to serious threats directed towards a symbolic universe is ‘nihilation’, or the conceptual liquidation of everything inconsistent with official doctrine. Foreigners were labelled ‘barbarians’ or ‘devils’ in order to be conceptually eliminated. The official rhetoric reduced the European to a devil, a ghost, an unreal goblin hovering on the border of humanity. Many texts of the first half of the nineteenth century referred to the English as ‘foreign devils’ (yangguizi), ‘devil slaves’ (guinu), ‘barbarian devils’ (fangui), ‘island barbarians’ (daoyi), ‘blue-eyed barbarian slaves’ (biyan yinu), or ‘red-haired barbarians’ (hongmaofan). Officials in Canton wrote that ‘even though the people have had social intercourse with the barbarians, they still call them fan-kuei. They do not even consider them to be human beings.’13 The only English textbook available in the bookshops near the factories in Canton was simply called Devils’ Talk.14 On a more sophisticated level, Wang Kaiyun (1833–1916), a celebrated scholar from Hunan province, compared foreigners to matter (wu), an entity without life.15 The idea of foreigners as devils, which permeated official rhetoric until the beginning of the 1860s, was important enough to incite missionaries to contribute articles in Chinese on the correct distinction between humans and ghosts.16
Dehumanisation of the enemy is a process common to all societies. During religious violence in early modern France, for instance, the state’s enemies were transformed into ‘vermin’ or ‘devils’ before being dragged through the streets and having their genitalia mutilated and their limbs chopped off.17 Diabolisation of the enemy not only sanctioned violence, it also enhanced group cohesion. In the face of foreign threats, collective identity was promoted by dividing the world into subhuman aliens and human Chinese. It is legitimate to wonder to what extent the use of derogatory terminology in China reflected genuine feelings of superiority or merely a passive compliance with an established discourse. As with most historical texts of this sort, it is difficult to distinguish personal feelings from official rhetoric. The whole question of the ‘reality’ of a belief, however, seems a somewhat empty one: the existence of a textual discourse reflects a certain consciousness. It is this consciousness which is of interest to the social historian, not the personal state of mind of an author. Even if some officials did not ‘really’ believe in the barbarian nature of foreigners, they actively participated in the maintenance of a hierarchical consciousness by accepting a discourse based on the notion of foreign inferiority.
Invaders were perceived as demons as early as the Song dynasty. Japanese scholarship even traces the foreign-demon in Daoism to the late fourth century AD. Timothy Barrett points out that, although there is no clear evidence for the existence of an indigenous tradition of fundamentalist religious racism, the equation of invaders with demons by the populace in seventeenth-century China is to be taken seriously.18 There is nothing to suggest that this perception was much altered during the first half of the nineteenth century. Both popular religion and elite rhetoric demonised the foreigner in an attempt to maintain a common symbolic universe.
Teratology
Skin colour performed an important function of social differentiation in demonological terminology. ‘The Chinese call the barbarians “devils”, and differentiate them according to their skin colour,’ wrote Xu Shidong (1814–73) in the 1840s.19 There were ‘white devils’ (baigui) and ‘black devils’ (heigui), presumably the Indian Sepoy troops in the service of the British. ‘The white ones are cold and dull as the ashes of frogs, the black ones are ugly and dirty as coal,’ explained Jin He (1819–85).20 White ash and black coal, both were the teratological facets of the same unreality: the foreign demon.
Social position distinguished whites from blacks: ‘Black devils are slaves, white devils are rulers,’ commented one author.21 The origin of the black devil was not always clear, as one report on the British troops in Ningbo testifies: ‘They carry off young men, shave their heads, paint their bodies with black lacquer, give them a drug which makes them dumb, and so turn them into black devils, using them to carry heavy loads.’22
Within elite culture, a well-established aesthetic value system contributed to the rise of racial categorisation. Prose and poetry derided the physical appearance of the foreigner. For example:
When the foreign devil entered China, he heaved a first sigh: he saw the elegantly chiselled features of the Chinese, embodiment of human feelings, neatly dressed and capped. The foreigner and the Chinese are greatly different! The foreign devil heaved a second sigh when he looked in the mirror… yellow hair on the head, curly hair on the body, green eyes. Disconsolately sitting head in hand, he looks like a monkey goblin!23
In official documents as well as in poetry, descriptions of outsiders were highly stereotyped, often merely repeating the age-old clichés traditionally reserved for frontier peoples. The terse formula ‘blue eyes black beard’ (biyanwuxu), in which both colours could vary, was common. Wang Zhongyang, for instance, pictured the English as having the beak of an eagle, the eyes of a cat and red hair.24 His portrayal of the foreigner was copied from the Mingshi (History of the Ming). Wang shared the common belief that the green ‘cat’ eyes of the foreigner could not stand the sunlight, and had to remain shut at noon. Another poet, writing during the Opium War, found that the eyes of the foreign ghost were ‘blue and dizzy’.25 For one observer, ‘the white ones are really ghosts; the sounds of their speech are similar to birds, their shins and chest are covered with hair, their green eyes suffer when they look in the distance’.26 A popular text entitled Short Study of the English Red-Haired Barbarians expressed the belief that foreign soldiers ‘cannot run, as their legs and feet are bandaged, and are difficult to bend or to stretch; if they fall forward, they cannot rise again: this is why they often suffer from a bleeding nose [in other words, are often defeated in battle]’.27 This cliché was repeatedly used at the highest levels,28 for instance by Yuqian (1793–1841), the governor-general of Liang-Jiang who had tortured several British captives to death during the Opium War. Statecraft scholars like Bao Shichen (1775–1855) questioned such a belief,29 but it was still being put forward by some high-ranking officials at the end of the nineteenth century.30 It was a remarkably long-lived idea. In 1949, when an Anglo-Chinese girl returned to China to join the communist revolution, her room-mates in the army assailed her with questions: ‘Is it true English people only have one straight bone in the leg and can’t bend their knees?’31
Anatomy
Speculation about the physiology of foreigners confirmed their inborn inadequacy. Some scholars asserted that their digestive system was dependent on tea and rhubarb. Without these two fundamental ingredients, the barbarian would become blind or would suffer from serious intestinal diseases. This misconception prevailed among a number of scholar-officials after the Opium War.32
Popular imaginary was stimulated by the relative lack of familiarity with anatomical knowledge until the middle of the nineteenth century.33 The human body was considered a gift from the ancestors that should be preserved intact; mutilation or dissection of a corpse was perceived as disrespectful to the whole lineage. Traditional medicine merely hinted at human organs in their analogical relation to cosmological elements.34 Only by the end of the eighteenth century did a Chinese doctor begin to record human anatomy scientifically. Wang Qingren (1768–1831) dissected a number of corpses which he had obtained after an epidemic of measles and dysentery in his home province in 1798: ‘I thus saw about thirty perfect bodies and in this way I came to know and compare the various parts with the ancient drawings and found they did not agree.’35 When he finally published a small volume on his work in 1830, he was condemned by colleagues as inhuman, sadistic and mad.36
The absence of common anatomical knowledge lent itself to speculation about foreign physiology. An erotic novel of the eighteenth century, for instance, wondered whether the European body functioned in the same way as that of the Chinese.37 The comparison may have been carried out in a tone of jest, but some scholars took the idea seriously. Yu Zhengxie (1775–1840), a major scholar noted for his strong interest in research and his liberal ideas, observed the following differences between the foreigner and the Chinese:
–Foreigners had four lobes in the lungs, Chinese had six.
–Foreigners had only four chambers in the heart, Chinese had seven.
–The liver of the foreigner was located at the right side of the heart, the Chinese liver was situated at the left.
–The foreigner had four testicles, Chinese had two.38
Such stereotypes were clearly echoed by popular culture in Europe. It was not uncommon, for instance, to believe that Chinese women had horizontal vaginas, somehow matching their eyes. Until the 1860s, a number of Chinese women were displayed in zoos and exhibitions. A Chinese lady (‘with small lotus feet, only 2.5 inches in length!’) was exhibited in Hyde Park from 1843 to 1851.39
Driven by the vigour of his four testicles, the satyr-like foreigner was relentless in his pursuit of pleasure. Anti-Christian leaflets spread the idea that followers of the foreign faith practised sodomy with their fathers and brothers and fornicated with their mothers and sisters. ‘During the first three months of life the anuses of all [Christian] infants—male and female—are plugged up with a small hollow tube, which is taken out at night. They call this “retention of the vital essence”. It causes the anus to dilate so that upon growing up sodomy will be facilitated.’ Celestials became the objects of the devil’s licentiousness. Women were ravished in the confessional. Young boys were abducted by missionaries to be sodomised, claimed another anti-Christian pamphlet.40 It was also alleged that Christians gave female converts aphrodisiacs and initiated them in the pleasures of sex; they would then despise their husbands.41
Many Chinese were struck by the hairy appearance of foreigners. Centuries before, the bearded missionaries had already made a durable impression. Giulio Aleni, for instance, had been described as a ‘man with blue eyes and the beard of a dragon’ during his first visit to Fujian province between 1625 and 1639.42 Hair became a focal point in descriptions of foreigners after the Opium War. The New Text adherent Lin Zexu (1785–1850), the Imperial Commissioner appointed to suppress the Canton opium trade, focused on beards in his diary: ‘They have heavy beards, much of which they shave, leaving one curly tuft, which at first sight creates a surprising effect. Indeed, they do really look like devils; and when the people of these parts call them “devils” it is no mere empty term of abuse.’43 Zhigang, head of the first diplomatic mission to the West from 1866 to 1870, confided to his journal that he was shocked by the natives of Ceylon, whose ‘black hair, about four centimetres long, covers their chest and all of their back.’44
Fixation on hair transcended the private realm of the diary. In 1848, Xu Jiyu (1795–1873), governor of Fujian province, published an influential work on world geography, in which Europeans were described as follows:
Europeans are tall and fair-skinned. They have high noses, recessed sockets and yellow eyes (some have black eyes). Their hair is often left on the temples or coiled around the cheeks. Some have it straight like Chinese, some have curly whiskers, some are entirely shaven, some leave it long, some separate the whiskers and the moustache like the Chinese. Young and old alike, the hair is worn about ten centimetres long; it is cut when it is longer. Hair and beards are often yellow or red (during the Ming, the Dutch were called ‘red-haired’, and recently the English too have been called ‘red-haired’, both because their hair is yellowish-reddish. However, all Europeans are like this, not only people from these two countries). Some of them have black hair (those with black hair also have black eyes). This is also true for the hair and eyes of girls.45
During the second half of the nineteenth century, there were further detailed descriptions of foreign hair to satisfy the curious reader. Zhang Deyi (1847–1919) reported from Europe that ‘when about twenty years old, the moustache and beard of foreign men start to grow. As a rule, they do not cut or shave them, allowing them to develop. At the age of fifty or sixty, either they start to trim the moustache, or they cut both moustache and beard, as it is said that when men become older and weaker, there is no further need to wear them, as they hinder whilst drinking or eating.’46 Foreign women were thought to suffer from excess hair.47 In France, noticed Zhang, ‘many women have long beards and moustaches.’48
The pictorial world of late imperial China, situated at the privileged juncture of high culture and folk beliefs, also teemed with furry bogeymen. Picture-story books for popular consumption, called lianhuan tuhua, started depicting foreigners from the Ming onwards.49 A booklet on Macau, popular in the south during the eighteenth century, included ten drawings of ‘various barbarians’.50 Bearded, moustached and whiskered, tall like a vision, with a conch-like nose and squinting eyes, the Westerner loomed regularly in the iconography of exotic countries during the late Qing.51 From the xenophobic drawings of the Qing to the anti-imperialist cartoons of the People’s Republic, visions of the foreign would be dominated by the stigma of hair. This early fixation was also due to a difference in customs, as can be seen from a missionary’s description of a barber in the Middle Kingdom at the end of the 1880s:
The streets of every town abound in barbers, who find plenty of work shaving the heads and faces of the natives. It is not considered good form to grow a moustache till a man is about forty years of age, and even then probably only half-a-dozen straggling hairs will appear on each side, while only old men wear a beard. The Chinese barber shaves every nook and cranny of the face with great care, even to the eyelid, nose, and ear, both inside and out.52
Odour was another characteristic of many foreigners. The nausea induced by sea travel and lax standards of hygiene among many Europeans certainly did nothing to lessen the initial shock of encounter. In texts concerning the Opium War, the arrival of foreign troops was usually announced by an ‘atmosphere of demons’ (yaofen) and a ‘wind carrying the smell of rotten fish’ (xingfeng). At a lower level, the influential anti-Christian tract Bixie jishi (1861) spread the idea that Westerners used to drink the menstrual blood of women, which they regarded as a precious gift conferred by God: this explained their unbearable stench.53 Such imagery rested upon genuine sensitivities, as foreign reports testify. One European was warned not to be shocked if a Chinese lady held a handkerchief to her nose, ‘for you as a foreigner are credited with a nasty smell.’54 John Hardy commented that ‘what they call our European odour is quite as nauseous to them as their yellow smell [sic] is to us’,55 a comment that revealed a prejudice common among Europeans.
Geography
Interest in more pragmatic scholarship had been revived by the evidential research movement in the eighteenth century. Knowledge of world geography, however, remained minimal until the middle of the nineteenth century. Before the skirmishes with the English in Canton in the early 1840s, scholar-officials were dependent on a small number of works for elementary geography. They were Chen Lunjiong’s Record of Things Seen and Heard about the Maritime Countries (Haiguo wenjian lu, 1730), Wang Dahai’s Annals of the Barbarian Maritime Islands (Haidao yizhi, 1760), and Xie Qinggao’s Maritime Record (Hailu, 1820). All three were based on the traditional barbarian imagery that had been passed down for hundreds of years. The widely used work of Chen Lunjiong, for instance, still referred to ‘red-haired barbarians’ and ‘black devils’. These books were based on distorted information copied from previous compilations. For example, was England another name for Holland or was it a dependency of Holland? Portugal was near Malacca. France was originally Buddhist, later turned Catholic, and was finally believed to be the same as Portugal.56
During the 1840s, scholar-officials directly involved in foreign affairs became increasingly aware of the need for more accurate information. Lin Zexu and New Text Confucianists such as Xu Jiyu or Wei Yuan compiled more pragmatic descriptions of the outside world. Their work, however, was fraught with ambivalence. On the one hand, they actively contributed to the dissolution of sinocentrism by relativising their own universe’s position: they revealed that China was only one nation among many others. On the other hand, their view of outsiders was influenced by long-standing stereotypes. The Yinghuan zhilüe, for instance, was a geographical account compiled from various European and Chinese sources by Xu Jiyu in 1848. Despite his personal contacts with foreigners in Xiamen, the author still believed that ‘the hair and eyes of some [foreigners] gradually turn black when they come to China and stay for a long time. The features of such men and women half-resemble the Chinese.’57
Compensation characterised these early attempts at building a different worldview. ‘In his discussion of the continents, he [Xu Jiyu] attempted to compensate for China’s occupation of only a corner, and control of less than a half, of Asia by observing that Asia was the largest of the world’s continents. He also felt compelled to deliver an opening statement on China’s magnificence.’58 Wei Yuan’s treatise adopted a traditional vocabulary and categorised the world in ocean-regions that were in conformity with the classical image of China as a centred maritime world.59
Africa was represented in strongly negative terms. Xu Jiyu’s account presented the continent as a desperately chaotic place, inhabited by retrograde black barbarians. ‘It is scorching, miasmic and pestilential. Its climate and its people are the worst of the four continents.’ Ethiopians were described as animals ‘living in holes and catching insects for food.’
In West Africa, people ‘go half naked, not covering their genitals’, freely coupling ‘without distinguishing races’ (zhongzu wu bie); enslaved, they ‘never complain and never try to escape’,60 a remark that echoed the legends on the kunlun slave. Others compared Africa to the hundun, or Chaos, the primeval state of the universe according to Chinese folklore.61 Tan Sitong (1865–98), a brilliant philosopher who would become one of the most radical reformers during the 1890s, also resorted to traditional concepts to divide the world into three regions in his ‘Views on the Management of World Affairs’ (1889). China, Korea, Tibet, Vietnam and Burma formed the core of the universe, called huaxia zhi guo, or Chinese states; Japan, Russia, Europe and North America constituted the yidi zhi guo, or States of the Barbarians; and Africa, South America and Australia were relegated to the lowest category, the qinshou zhi guo, or States of the Beasts.62
The portrayal of foreign countries in the popular press was also replete with contempt for ‘barbarian’ parts of the world like India and Africa, indicating that these stereotypes were not confined to the elite.63 Popular encyclopedias, called riyong leishu, channelled elite prejudice down to the lower levels of popular culture. Similar to European almanacs, they dealt with household affairs, elementary education, sample contract forms for ordinary people and clan regulations. They also provided information on a range of topics that included food, clothes and travel routes.64 Sakai Tadao, who has investigated these popular encyclopedias in detail, noted that sections on foreign barbarians were common even under the Ming.65
Typology
Foreigners travelling in China after the Opium War were generally met with alarm. ‘Indeed it was painful to observe the undue timidity that men, women, and children of all classes evinced at the sight of the foreigner […] At fifty yards off, my appearance was the signal for women to bolt into their houses with screaming children and bar the doors […] A crowd of gaping mouths and staring eyes would follow at a distance.’66
Those who finally discovered that the foreigners’ legs were not so stiff that they would simply fall, that they were not stone-blind, and that their faces were not uniformly red still judged their appearance awesome and ugly. ‘They vote his large nose ugly, dislike his pale complexion, criticise the color of his eyes, and object to the angle at which they are set.’67 Foreigners had ‘huge feet’ and were ‘mightily tall’; some had a head ‘as large as a bucket’.68 These initial reactions, the product of a complex interplay between ignorance, fear and prejudice, were rife well into the second half of the twentieth century, especially in the more secluded hinterland. Needless to say, the same type of prejudice against outsiders was also common in Europe and the United States.
The first encounters of Qing envoys abroad with foreigners were equally dominated by fear. Zhang Deyi found that the Mexicans had ‘fat features, flat noses and big bones; they are black or yellow. Males and females, old and young, they all look like devils; they are shocking and scaring.’69 Representatives of three East African countries whom he encountered in London were judged to be ‘frightening with their iron faces and silver teeth’.70 The Manchu dignitary Binchun, travelling abroad for the first time in 1866 in the company of Robert Hart, was scared by the prostitutes of Ceylon. ‘They have their hair coiled up in a bun, deep-red lips and faces coloured like pale ink. When they see passing travellers, their laughing dimples, their large teeth and their bare feet frighten people.’71 Most white sex workers, noted an imperial envoy in the 1890s, ‘have big teeth and tousled hair, and are as ugly as devils and as frightening as lionesses. They freeze the hearts of beholders.’72
Once over their initial shock, some Qing envoys remained puzzled by the sheer variety of foreign people. They rapidly categorised the complexity of human diversity into more manageable types. Zhang Deyi subdivided the population of the United States into three groups: those of a black mother and a white father, those of a black mother and a native father, and those of a native mother and a white father.73 One of the first students to be sent abroad under Yung Wing’s auspices in 1872 also divided the American people into three groups: the aborigines, the descendants of the African slaves and the descendants of the English.74 Li Gui (1842–1903), the Chinese delegate at the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876, noted in his diary that the European descendants called the Indians ‘reds’, the Africans ‘blacks’, and themselves ‘whites’.75
Not all travellers abroad perceived Europeans as ‘white’ people. In the north of Europe, wrote Binchun, ‘men and women have broad faces and full cheeks, their flesh is reddish purple; they cover themselves with fur and feathers, and greatly resemble the Mongols.’76 Most observers, however, used the adjective ‘white’, even though fair skin was sometimes explained in curious ways. Zhigang believed that the European’s white skin and red hair was due to daily baths of cold water.77 Xue Fucheng (1838–94) asserted that the consumption of milk was responsible for the pale skin of European babies.78
Qing envoys abroad increasingly referred to themselves as ‘yellow’. The exact origins of the notion of a ‘yellow race’ remain obscure. A Song encyclopaedia of the tenth century recorded a popular legend on the origins of humanity which divided people between noble and ignoble classes: the noble had been made of yellow mud, the ignoble of vulgar rope.79 In Europe, the notion of a ‘yellow race’ probably originated at the end of the seventeenth century as a reaction to reports of the Jesuits on the symbolic value of the colour yellow. The concept did not exist in the ancient world, and was not used by travellers of the Middle Ages such as Marco Polo, Pian del Carpini, Bento de Goes, or any of the Arab traders. In 1655, the first European mission to the Qing described the Chinese as having a white complexion, ‘equal to the Europeans’, except for some people in the south whose skin was ‘slightly brown’.80 When a young inhabitant of the Celestial Kingdom was presented to the court of Louis XIV in 1684, he was described as a ‘young Indian’. According to Pierre Huard, the first scientific work in which the notion of a ‘yellow race’ appeared was François Bernier’s ‘Etrennes Adressées à Madame de la Sablière pour l’Année 1688’. In this work, Bernier distinguished four ‘races’, including the ‘yellows’.81
The notion of a ‘yellow race’ was rapidly popularised in Western literature during the nineteenth century and reached China through the missionaries. During the early 1890s, mission schools even taught their pupils how to recognise the ‘characteristic colours of the various races of mankind’ (when asked what the colour of the Chinese was, one boy answered ‘human colour’).82 An article on the division of people according to skin colour was finally published in Chinese by several Westerners in 1892.83
It would be an oversimplification, however, to suggest that Chinese scholars passively accepted a label invented by European anthropology. Yellow, one of the five ‘pure’ colours in China, was regarded favourably, since it symbolised fame and progress. Yellow was coupled with the concept of the Middle, probably because the annual deposit of loess from the Gobi desert turned the plains of north China yellow.84 It also became the colour of the Emperor of the Middle Kingdom, ancestral home of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor. The Yellow River is still regarded in China as a symbol of the country.85 White, on the other hand, was associated with the West, and symbolised death.
Besides the symbolic values of the colour yellow, it should also be noted that the coding of colours has a direct influence on their visual perception. The Zuni Indians, for instance, frequently confuse yellow and orange as they use the same name for both colours.86 In China, the term ‘yellow’ generally covers a much broader range in the spectrum of colours than in Europe and included shades ranging from off white to light brown. Hence, for instance, the description of blond or brown hair as ‘yellow’.
In their search for a new form of identity, some scholar-officials turned more and more to the idea of a ‘yellow race’. It would become the foundation of a modern, racial taxonomy in 1895, as the following chapter will show in greater detail.
Since the earliest times an extensive barbarian imagery had been elaborated in imperial China. A pervasive but unsystematic racial typology evolved from these traditional ideas in the nineteenth century as a result of an increased emphasis on genealogy by the Qing court, heightened encounters with foreign peoples in the wake of the Opium War and the pursuit of new knowledge about the outside world. While these developments created a fertile terrain for the reception of racial theories in China, a systematic discourse purporting to classify human beings into different ‘races’ in the name of science only appeared after Japan inflicted a string of defeats on the country in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5. It was a major blow to the Qing and a cataclyst for far-reaching political changes, starting with an attack on the Confucian tradition.