IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Sino-Iranica : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
306 SINO-IRANICA
fix approximately the date as to when the pea became known to the Chinese. Thus he quotes the Ts`ien kin fan ¶ ' of the Taoist adept Sun Se-miao 2. , of the beginning of the seventh century, as mentioning the term hu tou with the synonymes ts`in siao tou and ma-lei. The Ye &utit kit of the fourth century A.D. is credited with the statement that, when Si Hu tabooed the word hu SI, the term hu tou was altered
into kwo tou I. ("bean of the country," "national bean "). Accord-
ing to Li Si-cen, these passages allude to the pea, for anciently the term hu tou was in general use instead of wan tou. He further refers to
the rah. as saying that the pi tou comes from the Western
Zuin and the land of the Uigur, and to the dictionary Kwan ya by Can Yi (third century A.D.) as containing the terms pi tou, wan tou, and liu
tou _V. It would be difficult to vouchsafe for the fact that these
were really embodied in the editio princeps of that work; yet it would not be impossible, after all, that, like the walnut and the pomegranate, so also the pea made its appearance on Chinese soil during the fourth century A.D. There can be no doubt of the fact that it was cultivated in China under the Tang, and even under the Sui (A.D. 590-617). In the account of Liu-kiu (Formosa) it is stated that the soil of the island is advantageous for the cultivation of hu tou.3 Wu K`i-tsün4 contradicts Li Si-hen's opinion, stating that the terms hu tou and wan tou apply to different species.
None of the Chinese names can be regarded as the transcription of an Iranian word. Pulse played a predominant part in the nutrition of Iranian peoples. The country Si (Tashkend) had all sorts of pulse.' Abu Mansur discusses the pea under the Persian name xulldr and the Arabic julban.6 Other Persian words for the pea are nujûd and gergeru or xereghan.7
A wild plant indigenous to China is likewise styled hu tou. It is first disclosed by e'en Ts`ann-k`i of the Tang period, in his Pen ts'ao as growing wild everywhere in rice-fields, its sprouts resembling the bean. In the Ci wu min .si t`u k`ao8 we meet illustrations of two wild
1 Regarding this author, see WYLIE, Notes on Chinese Literature, pp. 97, 99; BRETSCHNEIDER, Bot. Sin., pt. I, P. 43; L. WIEGER, Taoisme, le canon, pp. 142, 143, 182; PELLIOT, Bull. de l'Ecole française, Vol. IX, pp. 435-438.
' See above, p. 280.
3 Sui .fu, Ch. 81, p. 5 b.
4 Ci wu min . i t`u k'ao, Ch. 2, p. 150.
6 T'ai p'iic hwan yü ki, Ch. 186, p. 7 b.
8 ACHUNDOW, Abu Mansur, pp. 41, 223.
7 The latter is given by SCHLIMMER (Terminologie, P. 464).
8 Ch. 2, pp. II, 15.
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