IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Sino-Iranica : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
i 9tt•~+F
THE WALNUT 257
There is a tradition to the effect that the walnut was introduced into China by General Can Ktien.' This attribution of the walnut to Can Ktien, however, is a purely retrospective thought, which is not contained in the contemporaneous documents of the Han Annals. There are, in fact, as we have seen, only two cultivated plants which can directly be credited to the mission of Can Ktien to the west,— the grape and the alfalfa. All others are ascribed to him in subsequent books. BRETSCHNEIDER, in his long enumeration of Can-K`ien plants,' has been somewhat uncritical in adopting the statements of such a recent work as the Pen ts`ao kcal mu without even taking pains to examine the sources there referred to. This subject requires a renewed critical investigation for each particular plant. As regards the walnut, Bretschneider was exposed to singular errors, which should be rectified, as they have passed into and still prominently figure in classical botanical and historical books of our time. According to Bretschneider, the walnut was brought from Kiang-hu A , and "K`iang" was at the time of the Han dynasty the name for Tibet. There is, of course, no such geographical name as "K`ian-hu"; but we have here the two ethnical terms, " K `ian " and "Hu," joined into a compound. Moreover, the Klan (anciently *Gian) of the Han period, while they may be regarded as the forefathers of the subsequent Tibetan tribes, did not inhabit the country which we now designate as Tibet; and the term "Hu" as a rule does not include Tibetans. What is said in this respect in the Pen ts`ao kan mu' is vague enough: it is a single sentence culled from the T`u kin pen ts`ao R * V- of Su Sun A (latter part of the eleventh century) of the Sung period, which reads, " The original habitat of this fruit was in the countries of the K`ian and the Hu" (iIL * * A NJ) . Any conclusion like an introduction of the walnut from "Tibet" cannot be based on this statement.
Bretschneider's first victim was the father of the science of historical and geographical botany, A. DE CANDOLLE,4 who stated, referring to him as his authority, "Chinese authors say that the walnut was introduced among them from Tibet, under the Han dynasty, by Chang-
1 The first to reveal this tradition from the Pen ts'ao kan mu was W. SCHOTT (Abh. Berl. Akad., 1842, p. 27o).
2 Chinese Recorder, 1871, pp. 221-223; and Bot. Sin., pt. I, p. 25. Likewise Hirth, T'oung Pao, Vol. VI, 1895, p. 439. Also GILES (Biographical Dictionary, p. 12) connects the walnut with Cain Kien.
3 Ch. 3o, p. 16.
4 Origin of Cultivated Plants, p. 427.
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