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0188 Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1
Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 / Page 188 (Color Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000246
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172   119. CARAGIAN

121, 3 a); these transcriptions render Lolo and Lolos respectively, the final -s being the mark of the plural in Mongolian. There were, no doubt, Lolo tribes within the modern boundaries of Yün-nan, but the conditions in which the districts of the Lolos and the Lolo-Jang are named in the above-mentioned text seem to imply that we have there to deal with the Lolos of the Chiench'ang Valley, Polo's « Gaindu » (q. v.), which is now in Ssû-ch'uan, but which belonged to Yunnan under the Mongols. It follows that the Mongols of the middle of the 13th cent. have used the name Jang, with various epithets, in reference to the population of the Ta-li kingdom, to the Mosso of Li-chiang, and to the Lolo of the Chien-ch'ang Valley.

The value of Jang has been much discussed. I shall waste no time on T'u Chi's explanation of chang (= Jang) as a barbarian pronunciation of Ch. A jên, «man» (47, 4 b), or BLOCHET's statement that yang has lost in Mongolian its meaning of « primitive population » to retain only that of « nature », (C character » (Bl, II, 375); yang is certainly the transcription of a foreign ethnical name. LAUFER was no doubt right when he recognized in it the Tib. 'Jan or 'Jans (dialectically also pronounced « Jung »?), used in Eastern Tibet as the name of the Mosso region of Li-chiang (JRAS, 1915, 781-784). QUATREMÉRE (Hist. des Mongols, xc) has already remarked that the name had apparently left some trace in Mongol history since the Kalmuk chronicle Bodi-mör, as partly translated in PALLAS, Sammlungen historischer Nachrichten (1776), I, 19, mentions the conquest of the «Jang» people by Qubilai in 1254. As a matter of fact, PALLAS used i- in its German value of y-, so that the form he really meant would be « Yang » for us. But since both y-and j-, as initials, are written with the same letter in Mongolian, PALLAS'S transcription merely shows that his interpreter had no tradition to fall back on as to the true pronunciation of the name. The same may hold good for a passage which LAUFER quoted from « Sanang Setsen » (SCHMIDT, Gesch. der Ost-Mongolen, 239-240) and in which, for events of the second half of the 15th cent., a king (qa'an) Sidam of the people (ulus) of «Jang» is mentioned. LAUFER supposed that Sidam (written «Sidam ») was not the real name of the king, but represented Sadam, the Mosso name of Li-chiang. Li-chiang is a purely Chinese name, which means « Li River » and, properly speaking, designates the Upper Yang-tzû or Chin-sha-chiang; it is another form of the more ancient gt ij Li-shui, also « Li River » (cf. BEFEO, iv, 170). In the Mongol period it was adopted as the administrative name of the lu of Li-chiang, lit. « district of the Li River », later fu of Li-chiang, or, as an abbreviation, simply Li-chiang. The Mosso name Sa-t'am, Sadam, or Sdam may be the same as = VA, as supposed by CHAVANNES who transcribed the latter form San-t'an, adding that the second character could be read both shan and t'an (TP, 1912, 602). But though this secondary pronunciation t'an (*t'âm) may be possible, yet it is not given in most dictionaries;

for instance the K'ang-hsi tzù-tien reads shan (*siäm).   It is with this latter value that
we find it used for instance by the pilgrim Fa-hsien to transcribe the second syllabe of Kau§ambi (Fo kuo chi, ed. Chi ku ko, 33 a). A reading t'an could only be due, in my opinion, to a misreading for u t'an (*t'âm), on which cf. CHAVANNES, in JA, 1900, II, 384, and my note (of uncertain value however) in BEFEO, iv, 375; but shan recurs too often in ch. 61 of YS to allow of the hypothesis of such a confusion. Rather am I tempted to trace Sa-t'am back to the T'ang period, c. A. D. 800, and to recognize it as the first

element of   a San-t'an-Ian (*Sim-t'âm-lâm; cf. Man shu, ed. Chien-hsi-ts'un-shê, 17 b, 28 a;