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0214 Sino-Iranica : vol.1
Sino-Iranica : vol.1 / Page 214 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000248
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388   SIN4-IRANICA

a number of heterogeneous texts. BRETSCHNEIDER1 has accepted all this in good faith and without criticism. It is hardly necessary to be a botanist in order to see that the texts of the Nan fan ts`ao mu &wan and Co ken lu, alleged to refer to the date, bear no relation to this tree.'

The hai tsao   described in the former work' may very well refer
to Cycas revoluta.4 The text of the other book, which Bretschneider does not quote by its title, and erroneously characterizes as "a writer of the Ming," speaks of six "gold fruit" (kin kwo & A) trees growing in C`en-tu, capital of Se-c`wan, and, according to an oral tradition, planted at the time of the Han. Then follows a description of the tree, the foreign name of which is given as k`u-lu-ma (see above), and which, according to Bretschneider, suits the date-palm quite well. It is hardly credible, however, that this tree could ever thrive in the climate of Se-ètwan, and Bretschneider himself admits that the fruit of Salisburia adiantifolia now bears also the name kin kwo. Thus, despite the fact that the Persian name for the date is added, the passage of the co ken lu is open to the suspicion of some misunderstanding.

Not only did the Chinese know that the date is a product of Persia, but they knew also that it was utilized as food by certain tribes of the

' Chinese Recorder, 1871, pp. 265-267.

Bretschneider, it should be understood, was personally acquainted with only the flora of Peking and its environment; for the rest, his familiarity with Chinese plants was mere book-knowledge, and botany as a science was almost foreign to him. Research in the history of cultivated plants was in its very beginning in his days; and his methods relating to such subjects were not very profound, and were rather crude.

3 Ch. B, p. 4. Also Wu K`i-tsün, author of the Ci wu min Si t`u k`ao (Ch. 17, p. 21), has identified the term wu-lou-tse with hai tsao.

4 STUART, Chinese Materia Medica, p. 14o; but Stuart falls into the other extreme by identifying with this species also the terms Po-se tsao, ts`ien nien tsao, etc., which without any doubt relate to the date. In Bretschneider's translation of the above text there is a curious misunderstanding. We read there, "In the year 285 A.D. Lin-yi offered to the Emperor Wu-ti a hundred trees of the hai tsao. The prince Li-sha told the Emperor that in his travels by sea he saw fruits of this tree, which were, without exaggeration, as large as a melon." The text reads, " In the fifth year of the period T'ai-k`an (A.D. 284), Lin-yi presented to the Court a hundred

trees. Li Sao-kün   /I) a (the well-known magician) said to the Emperor Wu

of the Han, `During my sea-voyages I met Nan-k`i Sen     )!i 4j (the magician of
the Blest Islands), who ate jujubes of the size of a gourd, which is by no means an exaggeration.' The two events are not interrelated; the second refers to the second century B.C. Neither, however, has anything to do with the date. The working of Chinese logic is visibly manifest: the sea-travels of Li Sao-kün are combined with his fabulous jujube into the sea-jujube (hai tsao), and this imaginary product is associated with a real tree of that name. Li i-Den's example shows at what fancies the Chinese finally arrive through their wrong associations of ideas; and Bretschneider's example finally demonstrates that any Chinese data must first be taken under our microscope before being accepted by science.