# Kunlun or Black people: different views and ethnocentrism  
Kunlun or Kunlun nu were words popular in literature in the tenth century and after, indicating an increasing presence of blacks in China. There is a variety of evidence of blacks in the period, in paintings, pottery figures and literature. Among Buddhist wall-paintings in Dunhuang in Northwest China, many have black figures (Yan Wenru and Chen Yulon, 1986, p. 92). Famous paintings also contain black figures. One painting, Yuan Shizu Hunting (1280 CE) portrayed Emperor Kublai Khan with a black officer on horse beside him (Figure 1). The  
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[^0]:    2 "It still survives in the name, Zanzibar. The Arabs called the Africans who came from the East African coast, the Zanji." Graham W. Irwin, "African bondage in Asian lands", in R. Rashidi and Ivan Van Sertima, (eds.), African Presence in Early Asia, p. 143.  
Asian Art Museum of San Francisco possesses a fourteenth-century Chinese painting of a black official, obviously of a high rank judging by his costume and bearing (Irwin, op. cit., p. 141; Chen Xinxiong, 1991, p. 149).
![img-1.jpeg](img_ref_2)
figure 1. Liu Guangdao's painting Yuan Shizu Hunting (1280 CE)
As the capital of ancient China from 1111 BCE, Chang'an was an international metropolis. Many black pottery figures were found in the area from the 1940s to the 1990s. A pottery figure in Madam Pei's tomb from the Tang Dynasty is obviously a Negroid, 15 cm tall, with impressive muscles and a short body. He has curly hair, red lips and white eyes, and his nose is not high but wide (Figure 2) (Du Baoren, 1979, pp. 88-90).