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
THE ALMOND 409
is said to be like pa-lan-tse. In the Gazetteer of C`eh-te fu, pa-lan den it is given as a variety of apricot.'
Ho Yi-hin, in his Cen su wen, published in 1884,2 observes that "at present the people of the capital style the almond pa-ta E St, which is identical with pa-tan E LI . The people of Eastern Ts`i A (San-tun) call the almond, if it is sweet and fine, den hinfi (hazel-nut apricot), because it has the taste of hazel-nuts.' According to the Hian tsu pi lei
pE, a certain kind of almond, styled `almond of the I wu hui
Park' A ift t AL, is exported from Herat M. At present it occurs in the northern part of China. The fruit offered in the capital is large and sweet, that of San-tun is small with thin and scant meat."
The old tradition concerning the origin of the almond in Persia is still alive in modern Chinese authors. The Gazetteer of San-se èou in the prefecture of T`ai-p`irn, Kwan-si Province, states that the flat peach is a cultivation of the country Po-se (Persia) .4 The tree is (or was) cultivated in that region. Also the Hwa mu siao ci 1 *
t,1` (p. 29 b)5 testifies to indigenous cultivation by saying that almond-
trees grow near the east side of mountains. It may be, of course, that the almond has shared the fate of the date-palm, and that its cultivation is now extinct in Chinas
' O. FRANKE, Beschreibung des Jehol-Gebietes, p. 75. Ch. 12, p. 5 b (see above, p. 399).
This observation is also made by Li ;i-6en.
gat-se cou h g m ;1.5, Ch. 14, p. 7 b (published in 1835).
6 Published in the C'un ts'ao t'an tsi 1 during the period Tao-kwan
(1820-50).
6 HAVER (Erzeugnisse der Provinz Chili, Mitt. Sem. or. Spr., 1908, p. 14) mentions almonds, large and of sweet flavor, as a product of the district of Mi-yün in ti-li, and both sweet and bitter almonds as cultivated in the district of Lwan-p`in in the prefecture of C'en-te (Jehol), the annual output of the latter locality being given as a hundred thousand catties,—a hardly credible figure should almonds really be involved. Hauer's article is based on the official reports submitted by the districts to the Governor-General of the Province in 1904; and the term rendered
by him "almond" in the original is to pien fen j 3, apparently a local or
colloquial expression which I am unable to trace in any dictionary. It is at any rate questionable whether it has the meaning "almond." O. FRANKE, in his description of the Jehol territory, carefully deals with the flora and products of that region without mentioning almonds, nor are they referred to in the Chinese Gazetteer of C'en-te fu.
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