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...
