IIIF Color HighRes
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Sino-Iranica : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
474 SINO-IRANICA
Lambesi; i.e., Besi or Basi (lam meaning "village"), a petty state on the west coast of Sumatra immediately below Acheh, upon which it borders. This identification is impossible, first of all, for phonetic reasons : Chinese po VZ was never possessed of an ancient labial sonant, but solely of a labial surd (*pwa) .1
TSUBOI KUMAZO2 regards Po-se as a transcription of Pasi, Pasei, Pasay, Pazze, or Pacem, a port situated on northern Sumatra near the Diamond Cape, which subsequently vied in wealth with Majapahit and Malacca, and called Basma by Marco Polo.3
C. O. BLAGDEN4 remarks with reference to this Po-se, "One is very much tempted to suppose that this stands for Pose (or Pasai) in northeastern Sumatra, but I have no evidence that the place existed as early as 1178." If this be the case, the proposed identification is rendered still more difficult; for, as we have seen, Po-se appears on the horizon of the Chinese as early as from the seventh to the ninth century under the Tang, and probably even at an earlier date. The only text that gives us an approximate clew to the geographical location of Po-se is the Man §u; and I should think that all we can do under the circumstances, or until new sources come to light, is to adhere to this definition; that is, as far as the Tang period is concerned. Judging from the movements of Malayan tribes, it would not be impossible that, in the age of the Sung, the Po-se had extended their seats from the mainland to the islands of the Archipelago, but I am not prepared for the present either to accept or to reject the theory of their settlement on Sumatra under the Sung.
Aside from the references in historical texts, we have another class of documents in which the Malayan Po-se is prominent, the Pen-tstao literature and other works dealing with plants and products. I propose to review these notices in detail.
6o. In regard to alum, F. P. SMITH' stated that apart from native localities it is also mentioned as reaching China from Persia, K`un-lun,
1 On p. 471 Gerini identifies Po-se with the Basisi tribe in the more southern parts of the Malay Peninsula. On the other hand, it is difficult to see why Gerini searched for Po-se on Sumatra, as he quotes after Parker a Chinese source under the date A.D. 802, to the effect that near the capital of Burma there were hills of sand, and a barren waste which borders on Po-se and Po-lo-men (see above, p. 469).
2 Actes du Douzième Congrès des Orientalistes, Rome 1899, Vol. II, p. 92.
s Cf. YULE, Marco Polo, Vol. II, pp. 284-288. Regarding the kings of Pase, see G. FERRAND, Textes relatifs à l'Extrême-Orient, Vol. II, pp. 666-669.
4 Journal Royal As. Soc., 1913, p. 168.
6 Contributions towards the Materia Medica of China, p. Io.
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