National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

> > > >
Color New!IIIF Color HighRes Gray HighRes PDF   Japanese English
0054 Sino-Iranica : vol.1
Sino-Iranica : vol.1 / Page 54 (Color Image)

New!Citation Information

doi: 10.20676/00000248
Citation Format: Chicago | APA | Harvard | IEEE

OCR Text

 

228   SING-IRANICA

have applied a Persian word designating the cultivated grape to a wild vine which is a native of their country, and which particularly grows in the two Kian provinces of eastern China. The Gazetteer of Su-6ou' says expressly that the name for the wild grape, . an p`u-t`ao, in the Kian provinces, is yin-y4. Accordingly it may be an ancient term of the language of Wu. The Pen ts'ao kan mug has treated yin-yü as a separate item, and Li Si-ben annotates that the meaning of the term is unexplained. It seems to me that for the time being we have

to acquiesce in this verdict. Yen-ya   ji and yin-. e   Z' are added

by him as synonymes, after the Mao .i   and and the Kwan ya, while
ye p`u-t`ao ("wild grape ") is the common colloquial term (also t`en min or mu luni * ) . It is interesting to note that the earliest notices of this plant come only from Su Kun and C`en Ts`an-k`i of the Tang dynasty. In other words, it was noted by the Chinese naturalists more than seven centuries later than the introduction of the cultivated grape,— sufficient evidence for the fact that the two are not in any way interrelated.

It must not be imagined that with Can K`ien's deed the introduction of the vine into China was an accomplished fact; but introductions of seeds were subsequently repeated, and new varieties were still imported from Turkistan by K`an-hi. There are so many varieties of the grape in China, that it is hardly credible that all these should have at once been brought over by a single man. It is related in the Han Annals

that Li Kwan-li   ßi1, being General of Er-gi. i iii (*Ni-S'i), after
the subjugation of Ta-yuan, obtained grapes which he took along to China.

Three varieties of grape are indicated in the Kwan ei,3 written before A.D. 527,- yellow, black, and white. The same varieties are enumerated in the Yu yan tsa tsu, while Li i-6en speaks of four varie-

ties,— a round one, called tstao lunCu    A ("vegetable dragon-
pearls ") ; a long one, ma u p`u-t`ao (see below) ; a white one, called "crystal grapes" (vi tsin p`u-t`ao); and a black one, called "purple

grapes" (tse   p`u-t`ao),and assigns to Se-6`wan a green () grape,
to Yün-nan grapes of the size of a jujube.' Su Sun of the Sung mentions a variety of seedless grapes.

1 Su cou fu ci, Ch. 20, p. 7 b.

2 Ch. 33, P. 4.

3 T'ai p'in yü lan, Ch. 972, p. 3.

4 T'an Tsui i=: , in his valuable description of Yün-nan (Tien hat hen ci, published in 1799, Ch. 10, p. 2, ed. of Wen yin lou yü ti ts'un Su), states that the grapes of southern Yün-nan are excellent, but that they cannot be dried or sent to distant places.