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0067 Notes on Marco Polo : vol.2
Notes on Marco Polo : vol.2 / Page 67 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000246
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228. FANSUR   663

« Facfur »], and then semantic, and due to the influence on *Man§ûr of the true Mansûrah of III, 378-379). Down to the 16th cent., Fansûr is regularly mentioned as the place from which the best camphor, called fansicri, came (cf. Hobson-Jobson2, 152; Fe, 696, 702; as usual with him,

FERRAND read   a as c", which is an interpretation, not a transcription; JA, 1922, II, 72-73, 95;
also Hudiid-al-`Alam, Pers. text, 14 b; Mi, 240-241). Fansûr is an arabicized form, and it is the one which has been used by Polo. Owing to errors in diacritical points, Fansûr and fan. üri have been variously altered, mostly into gaisûri, which has remained in use in India almost until our day (cf. Hobson-Jobson2, 151). But the fault has been long denounced, and ought not still to occur in GAY, Glossaire archéologique, I, 269; II, 256.

In 1904 (BEFEO, iv, 341), I considered as identical with Fansûr Chinese transcriptions of the 13th-15th cent. beginning with a p-. YULE ( Y, ii, 302) has quoted a form « Pansor » from Ibn Serapion, but this proves nothing, since the same letter is used both for p- and f- in Syriac; and in the Arabic translation of Ibn Serapion, the word is written « Faisûr », a misreading instead of Fansûr (cf. Fe, 142). As to the identification of these forms in p- with Fansûr, FERRAND (JA, 1922, it, 72) has expressed doubts from a geographical point of view, and I have yielded to his arguments in TP, 1933, 331; but I think, at least in some cases, I must come back to my former opinion. With

Chao Ju-kua's A     Pin-su (su had a final -t; HR, 193, 194), the case is perfectly plain, since
Pin-su is given as a great source of camphor; we must restore *Pânsur = Pansur, the Fansûr of

the Arabs. In 1349-1350, the gE   Pan-tsu of the Tao-i chih-lio is more embarrassing, since
the author represents it as a mountain «behind Lung-ya-mên» and, for him, Lung-ya-mên is the Straits of Singapore. ROCKHILL, while restoring the name into «Panchor ?», thought of an identification with Batam of Bintan, south of the Straits (TP, 1915, 66, 133). On account of the name, I accepted in 1933 FERRAND'S idea of the island (« île »; « état » is a misprint in my note, and also « 1413 » for « 1415 ») of Pancur on the north-eastern coast of Sumatra. In 1613, Godinho de EREDIA still knows another « Panchor » on the mainland, in the region of Malacca (L. JANSSEN, Malaca, Brussels, 1882, 11). The only characteristic feature in the Tao-i chih-lio is that the author, Wang Ta-yüan, ascribes to the inhabitants of Pan-tsu a wine of fermented rice called 11)-] 'fir ming-chia, left without explanation by ROCKHILL. It recalls to some extent the pao-lêng-chio rice wine mentioned by Chou Ta-kuan in Cambodia, the second part of which must be Khmer rail/co, now ar ka, « un-husked rice»; cf. BEFEO, XVIII, ix, 9; though the partial analogy may be fortuitous. But much in Wang Ta-yüan's notices is open to doubt; and here his Lung-ya-mên may be quite different from the Straits of Singapore, and refer to the south-western coast of Sumatra. There is in the Ming

shih (324, 9 b; 326, 1 a) a mention of a state of VI   Pan-tsu-êrh, about 1415, and of a state of

: Ku-li Pan-tsu, which sent an embassy in 1403-1424; nothing shows where they were located. But, on the Chinese map of the beginning of the 15th cent., we find on the south-western coast of Sumatra a place and a river Lung-ya-chia-mao, in which PHILLIPS has seen the city and the river of Indrapura, but they seem to be more to the north-west (Lung-ya-êrh-shan and Lung-ya-shan in PHILLIPS are misreadings; cf. TP, 1915, 127; 1933, 330), and still more to the north-west, north of the southern coast and about where we should place Baros, there is on the map a name Pan-tsu, written with the same characters as in the Tao-i chih-lio and in the Ming shih. Here *Pantsur = Fansûr is surely meant, and the Lung-ya-mên of the Tao-i chih-lio has perhaps, in the present case,

4.