This collection examines the cultural and intellectual dimensions of war and its resolution between Han Chinese and the various ethnically dissimilar peoples surrounding them during the crucial 'middle period' of Chinese history.

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...

This collection examines the cultural and intellectual dimensions of war and its resolution between Han Chinese and the various ethnically dissimilar peoples surrounding them during the crucial 'middle period' of Chinese history.