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
368 SING-IRANICA
where they are styled it mo-tsei, *mwa-cHak.l The tree grows to
a height of from six to seven feet,2 with a circumference of from eight to nine feet. The leaves resemble those of the peach, but are more oblong. It blossoms in the third month, the flowers being white, and their heart reddish. The seeds are round like pills, green in the beginning, but when ripe turning to yellow-white. Those punctured by insects and perforated are good for the preparation of leather; those without holes are used as medicine. This tree alternately produces galls one
year and acorns (mac pa-lu tse, *bwaS-lu; Middle Persian *ballu,
barru [see below}, New Persian balut), the size of a finger and three inches long, the next." 3 The latter notion is not a Chinese fancy, but the reproduction of a Persian belief.'
The Geography of the Ming (Ta Mini t`un a) states that galls are produced in the country of the Arabs (Ta-gi) and all barbarians, and that the tree is like the camphor-tree (Laurus camphora), the fruits like the Chinese wild chestnuts (mao-li X) .
The Chinese transcriptions of the Iranian name do not "all represent Persian mdzüi," as reiterated by Hirth after Watters, but reproduce older Middle-Persian forms. In fact, none of the Chinese renderings can be the equivalent of mdzü.
(I) (Yu yan tsa tsu) mo-tsei, *mwa-diak (dzak, zak), answers
to a Middle Persian *madiak (madzak or mazak).
mo-.i, *mak-zak, = Middle Persian *maxzak.
flitwu-. i, *mwu-zak, = Middle Persian *muzak.
mu-§i, *mut-zak, = Middle Persian *muzak. Compare
with these various forms Tamil mVakai, Telugu mâcikai, and the magican of Barbosa.
t mo-t`u, *mwa-du, =Middle Persian *madu.
t . a-mu-lü (in Cao Zu-kwa), *sa-mut-lwut, answers to Iranian
i Instead of tsei, some editions write tsö (*dzak, diak), which is phonetically
the same.
2 The text has 3e, which should be corrected into g, for the tree seldom rises higher than six feet.
The text of the following last clause is corrupted, and varies in the different editions; it yields no acceptable sense. HIRTH'S translation (Chao Ju-kua, p. 215) is not intelligible to me. WATTERS (Essays on the Chinese Language, p. 349) is certainly wrong in saying that " the Chinese do not seem to know even yet the origin of these natural products" (oak-galls) ; this is plainly refuted by the above description. The T`u Su tsi c'en (XX, Ch. 31o) and Ci wu min Si t`u k'ao (Ch. 35, p. 21) even have a tolerably good sketch of the tree, showing galls on the leaves.
4 E. SEIDEL, Mechithar, p. I27.
6 The character t'a in Cao Zu-kwa, and thus adopted by HIRTH (p. 215), is
an error.
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