National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

> > > >
Color New!IIIF Color HighRes Gray HighRes PDF   Japanese English
0084 Sino-Iranica : vol.1
Sino-Iranica : vol.1 / Page 84 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

New!Citation Information

doi: 10.20676/00000248
Citation Format: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR Text

 

258   SING-IRANICA

kien, about the year 140-150 B.C."1 In Hehn's "Kulturpflanzen "' we still read in a postscript from the hand of the botanist A. ENGLER, "Whether the walnut occurs wild in North China may be doubted, as according to Bretschneider it is said to have been imported there from Tibet." As will be seen below, a wild-growing species of Juglans is indeed indigenous to North China. As to the alleged feat of Can Kien, the above-mentioned Su Sun, who lived during the Sung period in the latter part of the eleventh century, represents the source of this purely traditional opinion recorded by Bretschneider. Su Sun, after the above statement, continues, "At the time of the Han, when Can Kien was sent on his mission into the Western Regions, he first obtained the seeds of this fruit, which was then planted in Ts`in (Kan-su) ; at a later date it gradually spread to the eastern parts of our country ; hence it was named hu t`ao.i3 Su Sun's information is principally based on the

Pen ts'ao of the Kia-yu period (1056-64)   t 4 - ; this work
was preceded by the Pen ts'ao of the K`ai-pao period (968-976) Prilv Ç-; and in the latter we meet the assertion that Can Ktien should have brought the walnut along from the Western Regions, but cautiously

preceded by an on dit    The oldest text to which I am able to trace

this tradition is the Po wu ci fa `ill -Ali of Can Hwa   (A.D. 232-3oo).5

The spurious character of this work is well known. The passage, at any rate, existed, and was accepted in the Sung period, for it is reproduced in the T`ai p`in yü Ian.' We even find it quoted in the Buddhist dic-

tionary Yi tstie kin yin i   a :â ,' compiled by Yüan Yin 7G .
about A.D. 649, so that this tradition must have been credited in the

I Besides Bretschneider's article in the Chinese Recorder, de Candolle refers to a letter of his of Aug. 23, 188r, which shows that Bretschneider had not changed his view during that decade. Needless to add, that Can K'ien never was in Tibet, and that Tibet as a political unit did not exist in his time. Two distinct traditions are welded together in Bretschneider's statement.

2 Eighth edition (1911), p. 400.

3 eeti lei pen ts`ao, Ch. 23, P. 45 (edition of 1521). G. A. STUART (Chinese Materia Medica, p. 223) regards the "Tangut country about the Kukunor" as the locality of the tree pointed out in the Pen ts'ao.

4 The text of the K`ai-pao pen ts'ao is not reproduced in the Pen ts'ao kan mu,

but will be found in the Z`i wu min si t'u k'ao, Ch. 17, p. 33. T'an ;en-wei   {I,
in his Ceti lei pen ts'ao (Ch. 23, p. 44 b), has reproduced the same text in his own name.

5   *   JIj (or ig) 1 N   ft (Ch. 6, P. 4, of the Wu-6`an

print).

6 Ch. 971, p. 8.

7 Ch. 6, p. 8 b (ed. of Nanking). In this text the pomegranate and grape are added to the walnut. In the same form, the text of the Po wu ci is cited in the modern editions of the Ts'i min yao h (Ch. 10, P. 4).

~:.

11;