Scholars of medieval critical race studies, like Geraldine Heng, have shown how medieval Europeans represented Chinese and Persians while acknowledging the impossibility of covering how “the entire premodern world conceptualized and instantiated race”. Heng calls for the need to expand premodern race studies by focusing on how racialization operates in places beyond Europe. This paper seeks to respond to Heng’s call to action by showing how a better understanding of medieval illustrated Persian manuscripts, specifically the British Library’s fourteenth-century manuscript of Khvājū Kirmānī’s collection of poems in his Kamsa and the twelfth century Oxford manuscript of popular romance Kitab-i Samak ‘Ayyar provides a counterpoint to the scholarly over-emphasis on racial xenophobia in Medieval Europe, showing how a gendered ‘sinophilia’ shaped an emerging racialist ideology of Persian masculine perfection around the same period. By conducting both a textual and visual close-reading of the illustrated manuscript of Kirmani’s ‘interracial’ love story between Persian Prince Homay and Chinese Princess Homayun in relation to a similar ‘interracial’ love story between Persian Prince Khorshid Shah and Chinese Princess Mah Pari in the Kitab-i Samak ‘Ayyar illustrated manuscript, this paper uncovers how Chinese women were remembered as Persianate masculine models of javānmardī (chivalry) due to their ability to embody and redefine virtues associated with this chivalric ideal ranging from virtuous trickstery, gift-giving, ‘glamor politics’, and gender-bending. The scholarly consensus has been that javānmardī pertains to the sexed male body only. However, the way women, specifically foreign, Chinese women like our two Chinese princesses, Homayun and Mah Pari were celebrated as masculine models of javānmardī, points to not just a lesser understood history of medieval Persianate gender, but also race relations. This is seen in these two illustrated manuscripts revealing how the premodern Persianate world celebrated China, specifically Chinese women as chivalric leaders capable of reviving Persianate adab and kingship especially when Persian patriarchal models of governance were failing with the collapse of the Abbasid and Seljuk Empires as well as the rise of the Mongol Empire. Javānmardī also pushes us to re-think, from a feminine perspective, the cosmopolitan extent of the Persianate world, specifically how its ‘frontiers’ went extended all the way to China, challenging the Indo-Iranian focus that dominates studies on the Persianate world. By also analyzing the different challenges our ‘interracial’ couples face, I locate in both manuscripts’ depiction of ‘love between strangers’ the different tensions that governed the ‘frontiers’ of the Persianate world.