How did East Asians become "yellow"?

I previously recommended the podcast New Books in History, hosted by University of Iowa historian Marshall Poe. I noticed recently that the format has been adopted by professor podcasters in other fields, including Sociology, Philosophy, Policy Studies, Military History, etc. For example, here are the podcasts from New Books in East Asian Studies.

I found the interview with Michael Keevak on his recent book (below) quite interesting. It is amusing that Native Americans are "red", whereas E. Asians are "yellow". Keevak notes that European travelers to Asia before the 18th century never used this characterization. The earliest reference Keevak can find where the terminology is used is in a classification of races of man by Carl Linnaeus.

See earlier post Yellow Peril: 2010 and 1920.

Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become "yellow" in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.

From the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb, which depicted people of varying skin tones including yellow, to the phrase "yellow peril" at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe and America, Michael Keevak follows the development of perceptions about race and human difference. He indicates that the conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped with members of the Mongolian race, they began to be considered yellow.

Demonstrating how a racial distinction took root in Europe and traveled internationally, Becoming Yellow weaves together multiple narratives to tell the complex history of a problematic term.

Michael Keevak is a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University.