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0307 Sino-Iranica : vol.1
Sino-Iranica : vol.1 / Page 307 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000248
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THE MALAYAN PO-SE-ALOES   481

over the maritime route to Canton. Aloes was only imported to Persia,' but it is not mentioned by Abu Mansur. The two names sebr zerd and sebr sugutri (= Sokotra), given by SCHLIM IER,2 are of Arabic and comparatively modern origin; thus is likewise the alleged Persian word alwâ. The Persians adopted it from the Arabs; and the Arabs, on their part, admit that their alua is a transcription of the Greek word &X6 .3 We must not imagine, of course, that the Chinese, when they first received this product during the Tang period, imported it themselves directly from the African coast or Arabia. It was traded to India, and from there to the Malayan Archipelago; and, as intimated by Li Sün, it was shipped by the Malayan Po-se to Canton. Another point overlooked by Hirth is that Aloe vera has been completely naturalized in India for a long time, although not originally a native of the country.' GARCIA DA ORTA even mentions the preparation of aloes in Cambay and Bengal.' Thus we find in India, as colloquial names for the drug, such forms as alia, ilva, eilya, elio, yalva, and aliva in Malayan, which are all traceable to the Arabic-Greek alua, alwei. This name was picked up by the Malayan Po-se and transmitted by them with the product to the Chinese, who simply eliminated the initial a of the form aluwa or aluwe and retained luwe.6 Besides lu-wei, occur also the transcriptions fa or 'a nu or no hwi, the former in the K`ai-pao pen ts`ao of the Sung, perhaps suggested by the Nu-fa country or to be explained by the phonetic interchange of 1 and n. It is not intelligible to me why Hirth says that in the Ming dynasty lu-wei "was, as it is now, catechu, a product of the Acacia catechu (Sanskrit khadira) ." No authority for this theory is cited; but this is quite impossible, as catechu or cutch was well known to the Chinese under the names er-r a or hai'r-c` a.7

65. A plant, 6 fv9, so-. a-mi, *suk-sa-m'it(m'ir), Japanese .uku.amitsu (Amomum villosum or xanthioides), is first mentioned by Li Sün as "growing in the countries of the Western Sea (Si-hai) as well as

in    A and Po-se, much of it coming from the Nan-tun circuit

1 W. OUSELEY, Oriental Geography of Ebn Haukal, p. 133.

2 Terminologie, p. 22.

3 LECLERC, Traité des simples, Vol. II, p. 367.

4 G. WATT, Commercial Products of India, p. 59. C. MARKHAM, Colloquies, p. 6.

6 WATTERS (Essays on the Chinese Language, p. 332), erroneously transcribing lu-hui, was inclined to trace the Chinese transcription directly to the Greek aloe; this of course, for historical reasons, is out of the question.

7 See STUART, Chinese Materia Medica, p. 2; and my Loan-Words in Tibetan, No. 107, where the history of these words is traced.