This is beginning to look like a pattern

[ahorbinski]

Negative portrayals of Westerners began in the early sixteenth century, when the first Portuguese traders appeared on the southern coast of China and committed random acts of pillage and homicide. […] In the eighteenth century, as I have pointed out, the supercargoes of the British East India Company repeatedly got in trouble with the local government for homicides committed by Europeans against the Cantonese "natives." It was these acts of violence, rather than the exotic appearance of the Westerners, that had contributed to the rise of the epithets fan gui and gui zi ["foreign devils"] among the Cantonese and their spread to the rest of the country after the first Opium War.

--Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (98-99)

Yeah, my reaction is "What the hell is wrong with these people?" too.