The illustration comes from a work of Qazwini.

It shows a ship arriving at Zabay (in Indonesia).

Black and white people in the water watch the arrival.

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Note on the Zangi slaves offered as tribute to China.
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All possible mentions of Sengki (sometimes also written Zanggi) slaves to the Chinese emperor are mentioned on my website as they are very often quoted as being African slaves. The word Sengki would be the equivalent of Zanj and Arab influence in the Indian Ocean spread the word as well as the slaves to Java. See my webpages of: Liu Xu 940, Wang Pu 961, Wang Ch'in-jo 1013, Yang Xiu 1066, Chu Yu 1119, Ma Tuan Lin 1295. Most of them are repetitions. There are 4 in total:

(724) 献侏儒僧祇女各二   Offering two dwarfs, and sengqi-women each.

(813) 僧祇奴   four sengqi-slaves were offered.

(815) 遣使獻僧祇僅五人   envoys offered senqi and five-color parrots (this should maybe have been 813).

(818) 遣使僧祇女二人 Send envoys with two sengqi-women.


The names of real places in east Africa as given by Chinese authors are a bid different.

层期 or 崑崙層期 (Kunlun ceng qi guo) Madagascar; Li Kung-Lin (d1106)

层拨国 or 層撥國 (Ceng Bo Guo) Zanzibar; Chao ju kua (1226)

桑骨 or 桑骨 Sang gu ren (Zangi people) or San gu ba (Zanzibar) Chu Ssu-Pen (1320)

桑骨人奴 Sang gu ren nu; Zan-gi people slaves. Chu Ssu-Pen (1320)

I however think they were from somewhere in South-East Asia.

 

Sui shu (History of the Sui dynasty for year 607)
Yuan 82 Biographies 47
(about the kingdom of Chitu, in
the Malay peninsula)
The king has three wives and the kingdom embraced Buddhism. (The king) lives in the city of Sengzhi
   僧祗城 with a series of three gates about 100 bu (steps) from each other.

 

Note: the writing Sengqi (僧祇‎) is the same as for the slaves. And also on the Malay peninsula was the place where according to G. Schlegel: Ho-ling the country who donated the slaves to China was located.

 

Jia Dan (801)

To sail out of the west [mouth] of the Strait, for three days, one can reach Gege-sengzhi-guo 葛葛僧祇國[Kakap Sengi] Kingdom;(1) this is an island located to the northwestern (border) corner of Fo-shi Kingdom; many people of this kingdom would violently rob other people, so voyagers feel fearful.

(1) is an island of the Brouwers Archipelago beyond the northern coast of Sumatra. (Schafer’s Kat-kat Zangi country). Here the writing Sengqi (僧祇‎) is the same as for the slaves.


Lingwai daida by Chou Ch’u-fei (1178)
The most important festival of the country (Dai Viet) is on the 15th day of the seventh lunar month, when every family exchanges presents
with others. The officials present Shengkou (Zeng-ki)(slaves) to the king, who will give the officials a feast on the 16th day in return.

Note: shengkou (生口), initially meant 'captives in war' but then also meant 'slaves' in the Eastern Han dynasty. So it might well be different from the Sengqi (僧祇‎) slaves.

 

From the Arab-Persian side there were also several places in Indonesia that had similar names.

 

-Masudi (± 915) talks about the sea of China or Sandji, which is the furthest of all. G. P. Rouffaer identifies this with the sea of Djenggi or Papoea-sea from the Javanese history. Other authors however say that what is meant here is the Sea of Japan.

 

- Ibn Majid’s navigational tract from 1462 mentions Salat Zanji (the Zanji Strait) close to the Karimun islands.

 

Several more instances of words being transliterated as Sengki or Zangi  in the same geographical area are to be found on my webpage: Note on Inscriptions in Java . There is little more then the phonetic resemblance of the words with the persian-arab word Zanj and the Kawi word Jenggi and the fact that those people are slaves to support the statement that these people are African; this is just not enough.

 

Ge Chengyong 葛承雍. 2006 (see under) considered Sengzhi an expression of Buddhism (seng=monk) in Nanhai in early times. This idea has some merit. Sengshi is also the name of the Canon for the Buddhist Monks; from there that sengzhi can also be translated as the ‘Monks-Wisdom’.  This makes that: the donation of a sengqi-women (a nun as seng= monk) becomes the donation of a literate virgin. And the donation to the emperor of sengqi-slaves; becomes the donation of educated slaves. That would be really fitting as present for the emperor. 

 

More reasons for this is that the earliest gift of Sengki slaves from Java was in 724 which is way to early (meaning the Muslim influence which would have brought the word Zanj to South East Asia still did not exist) and the last in about 818. The first mentions of jenggi slaves in Java itself are from 1030. Older mentions then this (starting 860) in Java have all turned out to be later copies of old texts and maybe much altered. Louis-Charles Damais proves this for the Waharu IV inscription of 860. And the list of envoys from Srivijaya to the Chinese court only has Muslim names beginning from the year 962. See: Note on Inscriptions in Java .


It is often mentioned that these slaves were brought from Kalinga in Java. The new more correct name is Ho-ling. This was an early kingdom in central Java.

G. Schlegel (1898) thought differently.

 

Taken from: Ho-ling Kaling by G. Schlegel (1898)

G. Schlegel in his article Ho-ling ; Kaling spends 15p discussing the placement of Kalingga not in Java but in the Malaysian peninsula.

He starts by saying that Chinese sources knew a big Java = Java, also called Pekalong(an) and a small Java= Sumatra.

Tang dynasty (book 197) (618-906AD): Kaling, an island in the southern seas, lying east of Po-li, west of Topoting with Cambodja north and south the sea.

New Tang History (book 222): Kaling sent tribune during Cheng-koan (R627-649). Also Kaling is also called Tupo (or Shaypo). Then followed by a long description of the country from which G. Schlegel concludes:

-Po-li is identified as Bali but also as a place on the N coast of Sumatra. East of which is the Malay Peninsula (=small Java)

-small Java is 1000km south of Cambodia while big Java is 2000km south west of Cambodia.

-book 222: Kaling has Elephants; not in big Java; well in small Java

-book 222: Kaling produces gold and silver; no gold in big Java; well in small Java

-book 222: at the summer solstice shadows are clearly to the south; so north of the equator; not for big Java; well in small Java

- Professor Kern (1897): Kaling in the neighborhood of Malacca.

-book 222: south of Kaling is a large island Tamatyang to the east of which is Pofeng (=Pahang, east coast Malay Peninsula), west is Talung, south is Tsienchifuh also called Poanchipoah (=group of islands opposite Malacca)

- G. Schlegel ends by putting Ho-ling also in the neighborhood of Malacca.

G. Schlegel in this article also states using information from Chinese sources that Seng-shi slaves could not be African slaves as the pronunciation of the word was totally different from Zangi in those early centuries. (It was pronounced Seng-ti.)

 


Ge Chengyong 葛承雍. 2006. "Tang chang'an heiren laiyuan xunzong" 唐長安黑人 來源尋踪 [The origin of black people in Chang'an City of the Tang dynasty]. Zhonghua wenshi luncong 中華文史論叢 65: 1–27.

 

Zhang, Xinglang (1930) in his article: Importation of Negro Slaves to China Under the T'ang Dynasty asserted that the Negro slaves were imported by Muslims from Africa into China.

In 2001, Chinese historian Ge Chengyong criticized Zhang’s view in an article to probe the origin of Black people living in Chang-an city in the Tang Dynasty and drew a conclusion different from Zhang’s. Considering the thesis of the “African origin” not convincing enough, he suggested that the Black people were not Negroid from Africa but Negrito from Nan Hai (south sea, present Southeast Asia and called Kunlun). Some of the Kunlun were part of foreigners’ annual tribute to Chinese authorities, some were left in China by foreign envoys, and some were enslaved people sold to the coastal regions. As for the term Sengzhi, it is generally considered to be identical to Zanj (other forms such as Zinj, Zenj, Zandj, Zanghi) and is a word used by the Arabs to refer to the East African coast. …… Ge did not agree with the view, considering Sengzhi an expression of Buddhism (seng=monk) in Nanhai in early times. It is more proper to look for the origins of Black people in Southeast Asia rather than in Africa (Ge, 2001), a view that is accepted by scholars in China (e.g. Cheng, 2002; Liang, 2004)

 

Ge Chengyong: Some of my peers and predecessors have thought that these dark-skinned people, with curly hair, broad nose and thick lips, hailed from Africa. I believe they are more likely to have come from Southeast Asia, for example the Indonesian archipelago.

Between the fourth and sixth centuries, to which the pottery figurine (of black people=Kunlun found in China) has been traced, the trade route between China and Africa merely connected the Chinese empire with Egypt. So there is a very slim possibility that these men came from the heart of the African continent. On the other hand, words about them, albeit scant, appeared in writings of the time in which they are portrayed as 'wearing shorts and being superb divers or fast mast-climbers'. These are the traits associated with islanders from Southeast Asia."

Some of these men may have been purchased - or captured - by local tribal leaders or human traders in one of those Indian Ocean islands. From there they could have traveled to what today is Vietnam before moving further toward the heartland of the Chinese empire. Their existence in Tang China has cast a tantalizing beam of light on the society of their adopted home, although most details of that existence are likely to remain forever shrouded in mystery.

 

Early Global Interconnectivity across the Indian Ocean Angela Schottenhammer · 2019

 

(About the Senqi slaves brought to China)

We confront the fundamental question of whether these individuals with origins unspecified by the sources were in fact even actually African. At least initially, having only exceedingly rare and incidental contact with them, the Chinese applied the terms sengzhi and cengqi not to Africans at all but instead to the welter of Indonesian archipelago tribal peoples with whom they had for centuries much more commonly and frequently interacted. We can certainly assume such to have been the case from the inception of the use of such terms through the duration of the Tang dynasty. Indeed, entertaining the prospect that neither the enslaved children from Java nor the enslaved maiden from Srivijaya were necessarily African, the late sinologist Edward Schafer (1913-1991) speculated that these human offerings to the Chinese court at Chang’an may well have been of Malay-Negrito stock. Indeed, even as early as Tang times, the Chinese were evidently aware of an island northwest of Eastern Sumatra or Palembang (=Foshiguo) that was called Gegesengqiguo (Schafer’s Kat-kat Zangi Country), whose inhabitants are described as: prone to violence and who, once they have boarded their boats, are much to be feared.