Sino-Portuguese Trafficking of Children during the Ming Dynasty

Abstract

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese purchased large numbers of people in China as slaves. Many of those people were children. This article considers where those children came from and why they were sold to the Portuguese. During the late Ming period, as social inequality intensified, poor farmers increasingly had to sell themselves and their offspring to rich landowners as bonded labourers. However, some farmers chose to break the law and sell to foreigners instead. Other farmers became bandits, and kidnapped other people's children to sell into bondage. Both of these criminal trends provided the Portuguese with young slaves.

Introduction

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Portuguese merchants who sailed to Macau purchased large numbers of Chinese children as slaves. Such merchants are often seen as predators, intruding into another country in order to steal away the weakest and most helpless—and not without good reason. And yet the tragic reality was that they were not committing such atrocities unaided: the trafficking was in fact collaborative. Many people from within China, including the parents themselves, were offering the children to the Portuguese. Sino-Portuguese child trafficking was two-sided.

This two-sidedness has left a gap in current scholarship. Previous research has focused either on the European side of the equation or on the Chinese side: one or the other. In Western scholarship, many excellent studies have appeared on the structure of the Portuguese slave trade in Asia.¹ Other studies have shown the global scale of this business, which took Chinese children across the entire globe, to Europe and even to the Americas.² Fascinating research has also been conducted on the social and emotional lives of these slaves in colonial society.³ All of this research focuses on the Western sphere. In contrast, within Chinese and Japanese scholarship, excellent studies have appeared on the ballooning problem of bondage in the Ming Empire, and the domestic factors that were causing the poorest classes to sell their children.⁴ All of this research, in contrast, focuses on the Chinese sphere. No study has yet brought the two sides together. That is the goal of this article.

In the following pages, I will seek to explain how socioeconomic changes within the Ming Empire drove Portuguese child trafficking. There were two general types of trafficking: parents selling their own children, and criminals kidnapping and selling other people's children. Both grew out of the same fundamental cause: the dramatic changes in the rural economy. The rise of Sino-Portuguese child trafficking was closely related to the desperation of the poor farming class.

Context: The Plight of Poor Farmers

Let us first examine the context behind the child trafficking: the crisis of the small farmers. Slowly, incrementally, big plantation owners had taken over the arable land. In the late Tang dynasty, powerful families began to privately accumulate fields.⁵ They organised their land in a sharecropping system. In this arrangement, landowners lent plots, tools, and seed to their tenants, and in return, the tenants paid rent to them out of their harvest.⁶ In this article, I will refer to the tenant sharecroppers as peasants (佃戸, tianhu), and to the landholding gentry as landlords (地主, dizhu). At this early stage, farming was mainly for subsistence. It was not until the Song dynasty that powerful families began to expand their estates to grow cash crops.⁷ In the Ming dynasty, commercialising accelerated.⁸ New land was developed; new labourers were brought in; new agricultural methods were employed.⁹ Starting in the early sixteenth century, even larger estates began to develop, as nobility, eunuchs, and high officials used and abused their power to accumulate property.¹⁰

The expansion of the great estates came at the expense of small farmers. Over time, with each successive drought or flood, more and more people fell into debt and lost their property.¹¹ In order to live, they had to become peasants of landlords. It is also said that some farmers voluntarily chose to become peasants in order to avoid heavy government taxes (from which landlords were often exempt).¹² Furthermore, even after becoming peasants, people still struggled. They continued to face the challenges of floods and droughts. To make matters worse, some landlords were unfair. They tried to cheat their own peasants by various means, including arbitrarily seizing land, raising rent, or manipulating the prices of crops.¹³ Thus, many found themselves unable to pay rent. At that point, they generally had to sell themselves or their children into bondage to their landlords. In 1448, a regional official from the eastern coastline reported to the Court with alarm, describing this problem:

Everywhere, the rich citizens use private debt to greatly increase their profits from interest. It is to the point that some of them subjugate (奴, nu) the people's children, occupy their lands. The local officials do not dare denounce them.¹⁴

The poor peasants had to sell their children under unfavourable sales terms. We know this because there are extant sales contracts.¹⁵ These contracts show that in general, there was a fixed, standard price: three taels and five coins for a male child.¹⁶ The contracts also show that the sale was permanent: “His children and grandchildren will forever obey the household master's calls to service.”¹⁷ The sale was also absolute: the biological parent ceded all rights over the child. The child even took on the family name of the landlord and was removed from the family registry of the biological parents.¹⁸ Some contracts required the parents to stop communicating with the child.¹⁹

It goes without saying that the children's lives changed after being sold into bondage. Henceforth, they were raised within the landlord's household, to become bonded peasants (佃僕, dianpu).²⁰ As bonded peasants, they had the same duties and rental obligations as free peasants, and they also had some additional burdens. For example, they often had to tend to the landlord's ancestral graves or accompany him in his public duties. Some scholars have argued that bonded peasants also had to farm their landlord's personal land without pay.²¹ On a social level, they dropped from the status of decent citizens (良民, liangmin) down to that of indecent, subclass society (賤民, jianmin).²² This loss of status affected many things, including what kind of education they received, what jobs they could practice, and whom they could marry.

Exactly how severe were these trends? There is simply no hard data. On an anecdotal level, many sources complain that the trend was worsening, but do not give precise numbers.²³ At best, we hear reports that in the fertile region of the lower Yangtze river, the great estates had absorbed four-fifths of the available farmland.²⁴ Let us also note the words of the scholar He Liangjun 何良俊, writing in the 1560s:

Prior to the Zhengde 正德 era (1505–21), one-tenth of the common people worked for the government, and nine-tenths worked in the fields. [. . .] But for the last forty or fifty years, every day taxes have increased, every day corvée labour has grown more burdensome. The people cannot endure it! And thus they all have left their work. In the past, household servants (家人, jiaren) for the countryside gentry were not numerous. Today, people have left the fields, and servants of the countryside gentry are ten times more than before. [. . .] In sum, among the aforementioned common folks, six or seven out of ten have already left their fields.²⁵

He Liangjun thus estimates that the number of free farmers who owned their own land had dropped by around 65 percent. He suggests that many of those people had become bonded to the gentry. These numbers should be taken with caution, since he is clearly seeking dramatic effect. But even so, it is safe to say that the trend was large-scale and significant.

Context: Illegal Alternatives for the Farmers

Faced with this challenging situation, poor farmers made increasingly desperate decisions. As mentioned, the traditional choice of a peasant who could not pay his rent was to sell his children to his own landlord. However, many farmers and peasants avoided that path, instead choosing less traditional, and less legal, options. Let us now examine three such alternatives.

A first alternative was to flee. Peasants often abandoned the land to which they were legally bound and secretly migrated, searching for new opportunities.²⁶ While there are no precise statistics, anecdotal sources suggest that many of these vagrants eventually found a new landlord and continued in the peasant's life.²⁷ It seems that many great estates must have recruited any newcomer, without inquiring deeply into their pasts. Occasionally, such vagrants were tracked down by their old masters, but most often it seems that they were never recovered.²⁸

A second alternative was to turn towards banditry. The later Ming period was constantly troubled by revolts. Many criminal gangs consisted of former peasants who had no other way to feed themselves. The Jiajing Emperor described the situation in his enthronement speech of 1521:

The bandits of each region, many of them spring from this cause: in famine, cold, and hardship, they had departed [from their lands] and wandered without work, and were coerced and strong-armed to join up with gangs.²⁹

A Portuguese prisoner in Guangdong, Cristóvão Vieira, mentioned this problem also in a 1532 letter:

The people have no love for the king and his officials, and every day they keep rebelling and becoming thieves. Because those people who are robbed [by the officials] have no fields nor any way to eat, it is necessary that they become thieves. There are thousands of such rebellions.³⁰

Within the traditional farming villages, such rebellions and uprisings were increasing.³¹ The revolts culminated in the massive “farmers’ uprising” that raged across the Jiangnan region for the last years of the Ming dynasty. This revolt has often been called a “slave's revolt,” but it in fact included all of poor rural society, including free farmers, free peasants, bonded peasants, artisans, and day labourers.³²

A third alternative was to sell one's children, but not to sell them to the local landlords. Instead, some farmers sold their children on the black market. For our purposes, it is particularly important to note that some sold them to foreigners. This, of course, was completely illegal.³³ For example, in 1466, local officials in northeastern China reported with urgency to the Court:

Today, the people [. . .] are selling off their sons and daughters, whole crowds along the roadside. Their selling price is so cheap that even barbarians, foreign priests, come to purchase them.³⁴

Similarly, in 1481, another such scandal broke out. The Court received another report:

When the envoys from the two countries of Siam and Samudera were returning home after coming to the Court to offer tribute, along the way, their boat-men showed them how to purchase the sons and daughters of impoverished people, how to obtain large quantities of private salt, and how to engage in various other illegal activities.³⁵

The foreign market for children must have thrived in the Pearl River delta, where most of the foreign ships gathered to smuggle, including ships from Siam and Samudera (Sumatra) (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Pearl River delta.

Source: Adapted from NordNordWest. China Guangdong location map. 2010. Accessed 13 December 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta#/media/File:China_Guangdong_location_map.svg [map annotations added by the author].

Various Portuguese-related sources hint at this. For example, let us note the formal ban on human trafficking which the local Ming authorities issued to Portuguese Macau in 1605:

Ban on buying people: All foreign merchants, new and old, are not permitted to buy Chinese women or children.³⁶

The Portuguese were presumably the “new” merchants, since this was slightly before the Dutch arrived. That means that the “old” merchants presumably included the Malays, Siamese, and Javanese.. The implication is that before the Portuguese arrived, these other groups had already been purchasing bonded Chinese in the Pearl River delta. And even after the Portuguese arrived, these other groups continued to engage in trafficking. For example, in his discussion on the morality of purchasing children, written in the 1570s, Father Francisco Rodrigues says the following: “Even when the Portuguese do not buy them [i.e., the children], the bandits sell them to other foreigners who are in that area.”³⁷

In summary, we can see that many bankrupt farmers refused to follow the traditional, legal response to insolvency: to sell one's children to the landlords. Instead, they chose to flee, or to pillage and loot, or even to sell their children on the black market. One can sense their enormous anger and hopelessness.

Parents Selling Their Own Children to the Portuguese

Clearly, Sino-Portuguese child trafficking developed out of trends that were already present within the Ming domestic space. The phenomenon of parents selling their children to Portuguese merchants was intimately related to the trends discussed in the previous section. In this section then I would like to consider what it meant for peasants to sell their children to the Portuguese. Why did they choose to do this, rather than sell to a local landlord?

The first point to note is that peasants had to make a very intentional choice to sell to the Portuguese. It was not a casual decision. It meant taking significant legal, financial, and even physical risks. Under Ming law, private Chinese citizens were not allowed to speak with foreigners, let alone trade with them. The punishment was death.³⁸ In order to sequester the Portuguese from the local population, the Guangdong administration tried to seal off Macau. A gate was built across the only land bridge to the city, and a naval officer was assigned to patrol the waters.³⁹ Poor farmers could not sneak through such defences alone.

No source says precisely how the peasants managed to reach the Portuguese, but it is safe to assume that they must have used middlemen (媒人, meiren). Middlemen were basically recruiters, travelling around the local villages, connecting sellers with buyers: that is to say, connecting poor peasants selling children with rich landlords who needed labour. Their signatures appear on the sales contracts alongside those of the buyers and sellers.⁴⁰ Apparently, some middlemen specialised in working with foreign buyers. They must have either owned their own ships or arranged transportation with a local smuggler in order to transport the parents and their child across the waters to Macau. All of this doubtless cost money.

So why did peasants take such risks? The answer, of course, lies in the terms of sale. When selling to Chinese landlords, there was a standard price. In contrast, with the Portuguese there was no such standard. Everything passed through negotiations, and price depended upon how eager the buyer was, how healthy the child was, how savvy a negotiator the parent was, and so on. The European sources indicate that prices could vary significantly; some mention prices of “30, 40, 50 taels”⁴¹ while others mention “2 or 4 royals of eight a piece.”⁴² It is difficult to compare these prices to the domestic prices listed in the contracts, due both to currency conversion issues and to the significant problem of inflation in the later Ming period. But it is probably safe to assume that these prices are higher than those offered by landlords. Many parents doubtless went to great lengths to sell to the Portuguese because they thought that they could make more money.

In addition, selling to the Portuguese meant that the future of the child was uncertain. The Portuguese did not draw up a contract (perhaps because the sailors who purchased slaves were usually illiterate), and they usually transported the child thousands of kilometres away. Nobody knew what exactly would happen to the child. For some parents, this uncertainty was probably a strong motivating factor: it offered the possibility of a new life. Many peasants hated the sales contract because it was the physical proof of bondage. Accordingly, during uprisings, rebels often sought to find the contract in their master's home in order to burn it.⁴³ If the Portuguese did not force them to sign a contract, then perhaps the child's bondage would be less permanent. Similarly, while a parent might find comfort in having the child living nearby, such an arrangement also had a downside: it meant that the child would be looked down on as an “indecent person” for life. In contrast, if the child went far away to a place where nobody knew her or him, and where no documents could prove the bondage status, then starting a new life might be possible.

Accordingly, some sources report very optimistic behaviour among the Chinese parents. Some tried to negotiate with the Portuguese, trying to secure a future emancipated life for the child. For example, the Englishman Peter Mundy wrote:

The poorer sort of Chinese sells their children to pay their debts or maintain themselves (which, it seems, is somewhat tolerated here), but with this condition, as letting them to hire or binding them servants for 30, 40, 50 taels, and after to be freed.⁴⁴

It is particularly interesting to note that some parents tried to push the Portuguese buyers to accept a fixed limit to the period of bondage. This highlights a disparity between the Chinese and Portuguese systems. In the Portuguese colonies, it was not unusual for slaves to purchase their own freedom, though it took many years. In contrast, in China, bondage contracts had no term limit, and permanently downgraded the social status of the child to the lowest class, that of “indecent folks.” Fixed-term contracts and debt contracts did exist, but this was not legally considered to be bondage, and the labourer still retained the social status of “decent citizen.”⁴⁵ In other words, in the eyes of the Chinese parents, the Portuguese style of slavery might resemble a free, fixed-term arrangement rather than a permanent bondage contract. Perhaps the parents who demanded that the Portuguese give a fixed term to their children might have believed that they were offering their child as a debt labourer rather than as a bonded one. Perhaps they believed that the child could still be a decent citizen.

Similarly, Father Francisco Rodrigues seems to suggest that some parents thought they could eventually purchase their children back:

In regards to the Chinese slaves who sell themselves or are sold by their parents, one can deal with them as one deals with others: that is to say, that all the necessary conditions for being sold are kept. [. . .] In regards to the children whom their parents sell, it must be known that a father cannot sell his son except in extreme necessity, and even then with the condition that if the father, or the son himself, or any other person who might wish to free him, gives for him [i.e., the son] what he is worth, then at the time of redemption, the master is obligated to free him.⁴⁶

But not all parents had such a rosy view of the Portuguese. To some, selling to such foreigners was akin to tossing the child into an abyss. There was no legally binding contract, no way to track where the Portuguese buyer went. The child disappeared forever, as if dead. It should also be remembered that common rumour whispered that the Portuguese were cannibals who skinned children and then ate their tender flesh.⁴⁷ Thus some Europeans reported dark behaviour among the selling parents. The Englishman Peter Mundy, who visited Macau in 1637, wrote:

Some sell them outright without any condition at all, bringing them wrapped up in a bag secretly by night, and so part with them for 2 or 4 royals of eight a piece.⁴⁸

This attitude disgusted the Dutchman Johan Nieuhof, who visited Macau in the early 1650s:

[The poor Chinese man] will sell his sons and daughters for two or three crowns a piece, not caring what becomes of them afterwards, nor taking notice though he knows they are made slaves forever, and may be put to what employment the purchaser thinks good.⁴⁹

Such parental attitudes might seem cynical, yet sadly, it was perhaps a recognition of the very real helplessness of their situation.

Broadly, one can see that to parents, selling to the Portuguese meant selling to the unknown. Different parents attached different fantasies to this unknown: some held nightmarish visions of Portuguese cannibalism, while others clung to utopian fantasies of a free Portuguese society.

Kidnappers Selling Children to the Portuguese

The other group of people selling children to the Portuguese were kidnappers: Chinese criminals who stole children in order to sell them. I argue that this trend also arose out of the crisis of the poor farmers. The kidnappers were basically one variant of the peasant bandit gangs mentioned earlier: they were peasants who had gone bankrupt and were seeking to make a living off crime. Let us examine the evidence for this.

First of all, the geography of kidnappings suggests that the criminals were former farmers. It seems that the crimes did not occur in the major cities or ports, but rather in the agricultural villages. The Frenchman Jean Mocquet, who visited Portuguese Asia in the 1630s, wrote that the kidnappers worked “within the country, three or four leagues from the coast, in the settlements [habitations] and villages.”⁵⁰ João de Escobar, a member of the 1563 Portuguese embassy to China, wrote that the kidnappers were “robbing slaves [escravos] in the villages [aldeias].”⁵¹ The kidnappers were rural criminals rather than urban ones.

Next, the kidnappers were poor. They were not bandit kings or treasure-laden pirates. The Ming scholar-official Li Wenfeng 李文風 wrote that, “the petty thugs of Guangdong steal small children, and compete to get them.”⁵² The word “petty” (少, shao) emphasises the low class of these criminals. Let us also note Mocquet's description of the kidnappers’ methods:

When they see some pretty little boy or girl who pleases them, they flatter them and draw them on with little treats, always promising more to them, and then when they see them a little isolated, they seize them by force and hide them in certain places while waiting for night. Then they come to the seaside, where they know that there are certain traffickers, to whom they sell them for twelve or fifteen taels each, which is about twenty-five crowns.⁵³

The Franciscan priest Gaspar da Cruz, who visited Macau in the 1550s, confirms that this was the usual method of kidnapping:

All those [children] who are usually sold to the Portuguese are kidnapped. They [the kidnappers] bring them [the children], deceived and hidden away, to the Portuguese, and thus sell them to them.⁵⁴

These kidnapping methods are strikingly humble and low cost. The kidnappers did not own any special weaponry, equipment, or facilities. Their only tools were a hand full of sweets and a mouth full of lies. It seems that many of them did not even own a boat. They (like the poor parents) had to rely on middlemen or coastal smugglers to sail the children out to Macau.

The humble status of the kidnappers is also attested to by João de Escobar. He actually saw a group of these kidnappers. The Ming army had captured them and dragged them to Macau. After showing them to the Portuguese, an official was “ordered to break their shins and whip them, from which they later died.”⁵⁵ The brutality of the punishment is telling. The fact that the official did not hesitate to cane them to death, without giving them a trial or writing a report, indicates that they had low social standing.

The kidnappings were perhaps a perverse form of social protest—not unlike the peasant revolts. It seems that the kidnappers often targeted the children of the rich. Let us note Mocquet's story. He says that the kidnappers scouted for “some pretty little boy or girl who pleases them.” That is to say, they wanted to kidnap a strong, healthy child, who could be sold for much greater profit than a scrawny, sickly one. That meant targeting children of well-to-do families. The Portuguese sources describe this problem in an episode involving the infamous Simão de Andrade, whose trafficking activities in China contributed to the failure of the 1517 embassy. The Renaissance historian João de Barros recorded that when Andrade returned to India:

There were discovered many boys and girls from Guangdong, children of honourable folks, whom Simão de Andrade, and those of his armada, had bought, without it seeming to them to be offending the city in doing so. For they knew that in all those eastern regions, parents were generally accustomed to sell their children and to give them as payment or as pawns. And it seemed to them [i.e., Andrade et al] that those [children] who had been sold to them were of that sort [i.e., sold by parents], and not kidnapped by thieves.⁵⁶

Andrade thought that he had purchased the children of poor farmers, but he had in fact purchased the children of “honourable folks.”

Conclusions

In this paper, I have tried to show that Portuguese child trafficking fed off of trends within Ming society itself. It was one more symptom of the struggles of the poor farmers.

From an ethical perspective, we have seen that poor farmers had a complicated role. On the one hand, they were the victims: losing their lands, forced into poverty, unable to find other ways to survive other than bondage. On the other hand, they were the villains: the heartless parents who sold off their children to cannibals in exchange for cash, the kidnappers who preyed on innocents. Doubtless there were also other poor farmers, and many, who made choices that were more just and compassionate. But such individuals did not cause trouble, and consequently, they do not appear in our sources. They toiled, starved, and suffered in relative silence, neglected by all.

I would like to close this article by considering the perspective of the children themselves. After all, throughout this article, we have taken the perspective of the adults: the parents, the kidnappers, the Portuguese merchants. The children may have seemed like voiceless pawns. And sadly, that is how they generally appear in our extant sources. I can thus offer only a few tentative comments.

It seems that many children, and especially older ones, tried to flee. Many must have run back to their homes. The sales contracts for children always include a clause making the parents responsible if their child fled from the new owner, forcing them to denounce their own children if they returned home.⁵⁷ This suggests that some children did not understand that their parents had intentionally sold them.

The younger children were completely lost and disoriented. Although it is a slightly different context, let us note the testimony of the great Joseon admiral, Yi Sun-sin. He recovered a number of children whom the Japanese armies had taken captive as slaves during Hideyoshi's invasion of Korea in 1592. He described one particularly young child: “One Korean girl recaptured by Yu Sop was only four or five years old, unable to tell what her family name was or where she lived.”⁵⁸ Such youth had no hope of ever finding their home again. The scholar Ye Quan, who visited Macau in the later 1560s, tells the following story:

One day I was in a foreigner's house. I saw a six- or seven-year-old child weeping out loud. I asked the interpreter, “Was the child born in the foreigner's house?” He said, “No. He was kidnapped, sold, and brought over this year from Dongguan. He thinks of his parents and weeps.”⁵⁹

The child seems completely helpless, stuck in a strange mansion, far away from home. The sales contracts always contain a clause saying that the new adoptive father is not responsible if the child dies.⁶⁰ Presumably, early death, or even suicide, must have happened sometimes.

Those children who survived the initial shock slowly took on a new identity. They were given a new name (often that of their Portuguese owner), and a new social identity (that of slave). They also faced an enormous cultural adaptation. They were immediately spoken to in Portuguese, given European food and dress. They had left Ming society, and were entering the world of Portuguese colonialism, which had its own types of inequality and injustice. It is at this point that our study leaves off, and that other excellent studies pick up the narrative: studies which describe the later lives of these people as they flowed into the European labour market.