Was the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi) a blond? Hmm

Art by Claudio Gianfardoni

In characteristic open-mindedness and provocative radicalism, Mengzi [Mencius]  孟子 cheerfully asserts that quite a few of the Chinese sages, such as Shun 舜 and King Wen 文王, were not even ethnically "Chinese": 

Shun... was one of the foreigners in the east [of the northern "Chinese" heartland] and King Wen... was one of the foreigners in the west [of the northern "Chinese" heartland].

舜...東夷之人也。文王...西夷之人也。...

[Footnote: Already the Han dynasty commenter ... Zhao Qi, explains the scandal away by simply saying that the place where Shun was born was in the lands of the eastern foreigners, and that therefore when Mengzi  says that Shun is one of them he actually only says that he is a "Chinese" who happened to be born there; the same claim is made for King Wen, whose place was a bona fide Zhou place but "close" to the Western foreigners. The Western translations since James Legge have never dared to go against this tradition. Legge translates "a man near the wild tribes on the east" and "west" respectively. Even the otherwise impeccable Yang Bojun [杨伯峻] (Mengzi yizhu) [孟子译注] "translates" "eastern foreigners" and "western foreigners" as simply meaning "eastern" and "western", so that Shun was a "man from the eastern" and King Wen "from the western" part of the country. Many years later, a professor at Frankfurt University, the late Chang Tsung-tung [張聰東, pinyin Zhang Zongdong], made a new and radically different claim....he pointed to the northwestern origin attributed in Chinese mythological narratives to many cultural innovations, such as writing, and discovered at their fountainhead a man who had been misidentified as the "Yellow Emperor," Huangdi [皇帝]. Yellow, Chang argued, was not the emblematic color of the loess in the North China plain but the blond color of Huangdi's hair. He was a Caucasian. See Chang Tsung-tung 1988.]

                --Rudolf Wagner, "The Zhouli as the late Qing path to the future," in Statecraft and Classical Learning: The Rituals of Zhou in East Asian History, ed. Benjamin A. Elman and Martin Kern (publ. Brill 2010)

[Interesting in this context: the Caucasian mummies of the northwest China Tarim basin. Zhang Zongdong's conclusions about Indo-European contributions to Chinese were called "occasionally rather swashbuckling and quixotic work" by noted Sinologist Wolfgang Behr in his obituary of Zhang.]

Comments

[Steven]

Ancient Asia was ruled by a white noble class - not only China, also Korea and Japan

[Sammy]

White people always oppressing other nations!!!