Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University. His books include Sexual Shakespeare, The Pretended Asian, and The Story of a Stele.

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"All racial categories are constructed, but none so laboriously as the 'yellow' of East Asians. This learned and stimulating book ranges across a half-dozen centuries of writing to tell the story of East Asians' transformation from 'white' to 'yellow' (and many hues in between) and their homogenization as members of a 'Mongolian' race. Drawing on travelogues, medical texts, and works of geography, anthropology, and natural history, Keevak unveils the complex and surprising history of an idea that remains deeply ingrained in our image of Asia and Asians today. Becoming Yellow is a marvelous contribution to the history of racialist thinking."--David L. Howell, Harvard University

"Becoming Yellow is an absorbing tale of how science was manipulated in quest of assigning a less-than-becoming shade to Asian peoples. Poring over several centuries of European accounts, Michael Keevak documents how the jaundiced views of the literati were by no means evenly applied and how scientific justifications of racial theory were colored more by contingent events than physical truths."--Michael Laffan, Princeton University

"This book will make an indelible and enlightening mark in the fields of post-colonial, race, and cultural studies, and will attract an uncommonly diverse audience. It has a rightful place as part of the literary and historical scholarship that comprises the greater contemporary postcolonial project."--Don J. Wyatt, Middlebury College

"Well-organized and engaging, this very interesting and singular work is a solid contribution to various fields and innovative in both its focus and approach. I cannot think of any other book that addresses the same subject that this one does."--Larissa Heinrich, University of California, San Diego

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Becoming Yellow

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations....................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments..........................................................................................................................ixIntroduction No Longer White: The Nineteenth-Century Invention of Yellowness.............................................................1Chapter 1 Before They Were Yellow: East Asians in Early Travel and Missionary Reports....................................................23Chapter 2 Taxonomies of Yellow: Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and the Making of a "Mongolian" Race in the Eighteenth Century.....................43Chapter 3 Nineteenth-Century Anthropology and the Measurement of "Mongolian" Skin Color..................................................70Chapter 4 East Asian Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Medicine: The Mongolian Eye, the Mongolian Spot, and "Mongolism".......................101Chapter 5 Yellow Peril: The Threat of a "Mongolian" Far East, 1895–1920............................................................124Notes....................................................................................................................................145Works Cited..............................................................................................................................175Index....................................................................................................................................211

Chapter One

When premodern European authors attempted to describe the residents of other lands there was often little agreement about precisely what color they were, partly because before the end of the eighteenth century there was no systematic desire to classify people according to what we now call race. Western thinking had long differentiated between the peoples of the known world in a variety of ways, including often vague notions about skin tone. But markers such as religion, language, clothing, and social customs were seen as far more important and meaningful than the relative lightness or darkness of the inhabitants, which, in any case, was usually attributed to some combination of climate, gender, and social rank. Human "blackness" was a conceptual marker of difference that from an early date could be associated with dirt or evil (Satan was perceived as the only truly black individual), but in a broader sense it was also an adjective that was constantly utilized to suggest sin, idolatry, and cultures that lay outside the Christian community. Anyone beyond (or on the fringes of) Europe could be coded as "dark" or "black." Yet this, too, was not a racial distinction in the modern sense of the term. Even earlier, in the Greco- Roman world, skin color seemed to have held much less significance, although the lands to the east, known collectively as India, were always associated with marvels, fabulous wealth, and various forms of both human and nonhuman monsters.

It is against this background that we must understand a certain level of surprise when the earliest medieval travel narrators, such as Marco Polo at the end of the twelfth century, referred both to the leader of Cathay and the people of Japan as "white" (bianca). This description was extended to all Chinese when a version of Polo's text (and there were many) was edited for G. B. Ramusio's pioneering travel compendium in 1559. Other travelers to China such as Friar Odoric in the 1330s remarked that the people of the region were good looking (di corpo belli), although here the southern Chinese were described as pallid (pallidi) rather than white—and this, too, would become an important nuance in later accounts.

Beginning at the end of the fifteenth century, when (at first Iberian) travelers sailed around the tip of Africa and into the Indian Ocean, they were pleased and gratified to find that the people of Asia were not uniformly dark. It was another medieval stereotype (as in Isidore of Seville's Etymologies) that the inhabitants of the Indies were generally "tinged with color" (tincti coloris) owing to the burning heat of the region. This notion had become linked to another old legend that somewhere on the other side of the Arab world there existed a "lost" Christian (and perhaps "white") community led by the figure known as Prester John. He had been the subject of a fictional letter to the pope in 1164, asking for assistance in resisting the Arab enemy. Early modern Asian exploration as a whole might even be viewed as an attempt to fulfill a long-term obsession with finding Prester John, whose location constantly shifted as each new area became better known to Western travelers.

In 1511 the Portuguese were able to establish a permanent outpost for East Asian trade at Malacca, which for some time had already been a site of thriving international commerce. Persistent rumors of "white" people in the Far East had suddenly become a reality, as both Chinese and Japanese (as well as Arabs and other East Asians) were a common sight. The "whiteness" of these people was constantly highlighted, not only in contrast to the Indians but as a term that described their presumed level of civilization. A revealing case in point is one of the earliest accounts of the arrival of the Europeans by Girolamo Sernigi, a Florentine merchant who had been in the employ of the Portuguese during the first voyage of Vasco de Gama in 1497–99. Before sailing into the Indian Ocean the Portuguese had arrived at Calicut on the southwest coast of India, where they were told about a visit some eighty years previously of "certain vessels of white [bianchi] Christians, who wore their hair long like Germans, and had no beards except around the mouth, such as are worn at Constantinople by cavaliers and courtiers." Sernigi added that if these sailors had really been Germans the Portuguese would have known about them, so he wondered whether they were Russians instead.

We have no idea what was really said to de Gama and his party, and one must assume that the comparison to Germans was merely part of the way in which the rumor was received or retold from a Western perspective. Second, one suspects that the identification of these men as Christian was also a European assumption, since for centuries they had already fashioned an equation between human whiteness and Christianity. Moreover, the whole story was related at second- or thirdhand at best, and it was not published until 1507, long after Sernigi had returned to Lisbon. It has been plausibly argued, however, that these "white Christians" were in fact Chinese, members of an enormous seagoing operation headed by the eunuch Zheng He (or Chung Ho), who before he died in 1435 had established the Chinese as the leading international trading presence in the entire Indian Ocean region, a position they held for many decades before circumstances led to their almost complete (official) withdrawal by the time the Portuguese arrived. It has even been suggested that initially the Indians of Calicut may have welcomed the Portuguese precisely because they thought they were Chinese.

Whatever the case, Sernigi's anecdote was later canonized in Luis de Camões's...