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
SUGAR
28. The sugar-cane (Saccharum officinarum) is a typically Indian or rather Southeast-Asiatic, and merely a secondary Iranian cultivation, but its history in Iran is of sufficient importance to devote here a few lines to this subject. The Sui Annals' attribute hard sugar
literally, "stone honey ") and pan-mi (" half honey ")
to Sasanian Persia and to Ts'ao (Jaguda). It is not known what kind of sugar is to be understood by the latter term.' Before the advent of sugar, honey was the universal ingredient for sweetening food-stuffs, and thus the ancients conceived the sugar of India as a kind of honey obtained from canes without the agency of bees.' The term .i-mi first appears in the Nan fan tstao mu ëwan,4 which contains the first description of the sugar-cane,'and refers it to Kiao-6i (Tonking) ; according to this work, the natives of this country designate sugar as §i-mi, which accordingly may be the literal rendering of a Kiao-6i term. In A.D. 285 Fu-nan (Camboja) sent cu-U, 1 (" sugar-cane ") as tribute to China.'
It seems that under the Tang sugar was also imported from Persia to China; for Mon S-en, who wrote the i liao pen ts'ao in the second half of the seventh century, says that the sugar coming from Po-se (Persia) to Se-è`wan is excellent. Su Kul'', the reviser of the ran pen ts`ao of about A.D. 65o, extols the sugar coming from the Si Zun, which may likewise allude to Iranian regions. Exact data as to the introduction and dissemination of the sugar-cane in Persia are not available. E. O. v. LIPPMANN6 has developed an elaborate theory to the effect that
1 Sui ht, Ch. 83, p. 7 b.
2 It is only contained in the Sui Su, not in the Wei Su (Ch. 102, p. 5 b), which has merely Si-mi. The sugar-cane was also grown in Su-le (Kashgar) : T'ai p`in hwan yü ki, Ch. 181, p. 12 b.
3 Pliny, xi', 17.
4 Ch. I, p. 4.
5 This word apparently comes from a language spoken in Indo-China; it is already ascribed to the dictionary .3wo wen. Subsequently it was replaced by kan (" sweet ") cö or kan jL cö, presumably also the transcription of a foreign word. The Nan Ts'i Su mentions cu-cö as a product of Fu-nan (cf. PELLIOT, Bull. de l'Ecole
française, Vol. III, p. 262). In C`i-t`u ± (Siam) a wine of yellow color and fine
aroma was prepared from sugar and mixed with the root of a Cucurbitacea (Sui Su, Ch. 82, p. 2 b).
6 Geschichte des Zuckers, p. 93 (Leipzig, 189o) ; and Abhandlungen, Vol. I, p. 263. According to the same author, the Persians were the inventors of sugar-refining; but this is purely hypothetical.
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