# From Guangzhou to Quanzhou  
The foregoing record in the Song official history on the visits of Cengjiani contributes at least one last truly essential detail facilitating our enhanced understanding of the earliest presence of Africans in China. We can and should note that it identifies the major port city of Guangzhou as his arrival point on Chinese soil. In the reorientation of the African presence in China away from representing a pre-eminently Indian Ocean phenomenon toward its coming to constitute a nascent Pacific Ocean one, Guangzhou provides the initial locus.  
Guangzhou is distinctive in the history of commerce in China for long being the only port of call wherein trade was permitted by and with foreigners (Fong, 2014, pp. 475-92). For our purposes, the most relevant among the many groups that was to be found collected there in pre-modern times was an amorphous catch-all category of foreigners that the Chinese called the Kunlun (Wyatt, 2010, pp. 2-8). Extant sources make clear that the Kunlun were in the first instance Malays and, curiously, when described in the literature as free individuals, we discover examples of the Kunlun referred to with the same matter-of-fact and neutral dispassion that applied to the sighting of any other foreign merchant at Guangzhou. During Tang times, in the year 750, the esteemed Chinese Buddhist monk Jianzhen (687-763), stated: 'On the river (Guangdong), there were commercial vessels of the Boluomen (Brahmins of India), Bosi (Persians), Kunlun (Malays), and others, whose number is difficult to determine' (Mabito Genkai, 1928, p. 466).  
However, still more of the literature pertaining to the Kunlun at Guangzhou makes fully evident the fact that they were neither always free nor were they necessarily Malays. The most famous example to this effect comes to us from the Song era and from the brush of Zhu Yu (1075?-after 1119), who recorded first regarding the profusion of foreign slaves that: