IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
| |||||||||
|
| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Sino-Iranica : vol.1 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Citation Information
| • |
198 SINO-IRANICA
Kamchatka, and the Amur region, and flowers upon the melting of the snow in early spring.' According to the Pen ts'ao kan mu,2 the plant is first mentioned by C'en Ts'arn-k`i of the Tang period as growing in the country Hi *, and came from Nan-tun P* (in Korea). Li Si-èen annotates that by Hi the north-eastern barbarians should be under-
stood. Wan Hao-ku emu- , a physician of the thirteenth century,
remarks that the name of the plant was originally huan hu-su, but
that on account of a taboo (to avoid the name of the Emperor Cen-tsun of the Sung) it was altered into yen-hu-su; but this explanation cannot be correct, as the latter designation is already ascribed to C'en Ts'arn-k`i of the Tang. It is not known whether hu in this case would allude to the provenience of the plant from Korea. In the following example, however, the allusion to Korea is clear.
The mint, 1 f po-ho, *bak-xa (Mentha arvensis or aquatica), occurs in China both spontaneously and in the cultivated state. The plant is regarded as indigenous by the Chinese, but also a foreign variety is
known as hu pa-ho (*bwat-xa) a0.3 C'en gi-liars { ± A., in his
sin pen ts'ao ft V-, published in the tenth century, introduced
the term wu A pa-ho, "mint of Wu " (that is, Su-èou, where the best mint was cultivated), in distinction from hu pa-ho, "mint of the Hu." Su Sun, in his Tu kin pen ts'ao, written at the end of the eleventh century, affirms that this foreign mint is similar to the native species, the only difference being that it is somewhat sweeter in taste; it grows on the border of Kian-su and Ce-kian, where the people make it
into tea; commonly it is styled Sin-lo f po-ho, "mint of Sinra"
(in Korea) . Thus this variety may have been introduced under the Sung from Korea, and it is to this country that the term hu may refer.
Li Si-ben relates that Sun Se-miao , in his Ts'ien kin fan
h",4 writes the word 1 f fan-ho, but that this is erroneously due to a dialectic pronunciation. This means, in other words, that the first
character fan is merely a variant of 5 and, like the latter, had the
phonetic equivalent *bwat, bat.'
1 HANBURY, Science Papers, p. 256.
2 Ch. 13, p. 13.
3 The word po-ho is Chinese, not foreign. The Persian word for "peppermint" is piidene, pudina, budenk (Kurd punk) ; in Hindi it is padina or pûdinëkâ, derived from the Persian. In Tibetan (Ladakh) it is yo-lo-/iii; in the Tibetan written language, byi-rug-pa, hence Mongol jirukba; in Manchu it is farsa.
4 See below, p. 306.
5 As Sun Se-miao lived in the seventh century, when the Korean mint was not yet introduced, his term fan-ho could, of course, not be construed to mean "foreign mint."
6 In T'oung Pao (1915, p. 18) PELLIOT has endeavored to show that the char-
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright (C) 2003-2019 National Institute of Informatics and The Toyo Bunko. All Rights Reserved.