THE OLIVE 417
following definition of ulusun in Chinese: "Ts`i-t'un is a foreign fruit, which is produced in the country Po-se (Persia) . The bark of the tree is green, the flowers are white and aromatic. Its fruit ripens in the fifth month and yields an oil good for frying cakes." This is apparently based on the notice of the Yu yan tsa tsu. The Manchu word ulusun (-sun being a Manchu ending) seems to be an artificial formation based on Latin oleum (from Greek elaion), which was probably conveyed through the Jesuit missionaries.
The olive remained unknown to the Japanese; their modern botanical science calls it oreijuMI1 , which reproduces our "olive."1 The Japanese botanists, without being aware of the meaning of ts`i-tun, avail themselves of the characters for this word (reading them ego-no-ki) for the designation of Styrax japonica.2
The so-called Chinese olive, kan-lan R, has no affinity with the
true olive of the West-Asiatic and Mediterranean zone, although its appearance comes very near to this fruit.' The name kan-lan applies to Canarium album and C. pirnela, belonging to the order Burseraceae, while the olive ranks in that of the Oleaceae.4 Ma Ci, who, in his Ktai
1 MATSUMURA, No. 2136. Ibid., No. 3051.
' The kan-lan tree itself is suspected to be of foreign origin; it was most probably introduced from Indo-China into southern China. Following are briefly the reasons which prompt me to this opinion. 1. According to Li Si-éen, the meaning of the name kan-lan remains unexplained, and this comment usually hints at a foreign word. The ancient pronunciation was *kam-lam or *kam-ram, which we still find in Annamese as kam-lan. The tree abounds in Annam, the fruit being eatable and preserved in the same manner as olives (PERROT and HURRIER, Mat. méd. et pharmacopée sino-annamites, p. 141). Moreover, we meet in Pa-yi, a T'ai language spoken in Yün-nan, a word (mak)-k`am, which in a Pa-yi-Chinese glossary is rendered by Chinese kan-lan (the element mak means "fruit"; see F. W. K. MÜLLER, T'oung Pao, Vol. III, p. 27). The relationship of Annamese to the T'ai languages has been clearly demonstrated by H. MASPERO, and it seems to me that Chinese *kam-lam is borrowed from Annam-T'ai. There are many more such Chinese botanical names, as I hope to show in the near future. 2. The plant appears in Chinese records at a comparatively recent date. It is first described in the Nan 'eou i wu ci of the third century as a plant of Kwan-tun and Fu-kien and in the Nan fan ts`ao mu swan (Ch. c, p. 3 b). It is mentioned as a tree of the south in the Kin lou tse of the Emperor Yuan of the Liang in the sixth century (see above, p. 222). A description of it is due to Liu Sun in his Lin piao lu i (Ch. B, p. 5 b). In the materia medica it first appears in the K`ai pao pen ts'ao of the end of the tenth century. 3. The tree remained always restricted to the south-eastern parts of China bordering on Indo-China. According to the San fu hwan t'u, it belonged to the southern plants brought to the Fu-li Palace of the Han Emperor Wu after the conquest of Nan Yüe (cf. above, p. 262).
The fruit of Canarium is a fleshy drupe from three to six cm in length, which contains a hard, triangular, sharp-pointed seed. Within this are found one or more oily kernels. The flesh of the fresh, yellowish-green fruit, like that of the true olive, is somewhat acrid and disagreeable, and requires special treatment before it can
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