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Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

THE DATE-PALM   387

(hai tsun   , Chamaerops excelsa).1 The trees planted in Kwan-6ou

bear fruit once in three or five years. The fruits resemble the green jujube growing in the north, but are smaller. They turn from green to yellow. When the leaves have come out, the fruit is formed in clusters, each cluster generally bearing from three to twenty berries, which require careful handling. The foreign as well as the domestic kind is consumed in our country. In color it resembles that of granulated sugar. Shell and meat are soft and bright. Baked into cakes or steamed in water, they are savory. The kernel is widely different from that of the jujube of the north. The two ends are not pointed [as in the jujube],

but doubly rolled up and round like a small piece of red kino   .Z
They must be carefully handled. When sown, no shoots sprout forth for a long time, so that one might suppose they would never mature."

The date is clearly described in this text; and we learn from it that the tree was cultivated in Kwan-tun, and its fruit was also imported during the Tang period. As Liu Sim, author of that work, lived under the Emperor Cao Tsurn (A.D. 889-904), this notice refers to the end of the ninth century.' A. DE CANDOLLE4 states erroneously that the Chinese received the tree from Persia in the third century of our era.

In his note on the date, headed by the term wu-lou tse, Li Si-6en5 has produced a confusion of terms, and accordingly brought together

1 In the text of this work, as cited in the Pen ts'ao kan mu, this clause is worded

as follows: "The leaves are like those of the tsun-/U   (Chamaerops excelsa),
and hence the people of that locality style the tree [the date] hai /sun (`sea,' that is, `foreign coir-palm')." This would indeed appear more logical than the passage above, rendered after the edition of Wu yin tien, which, however, must be regarded as more authoritative. Not only in this extract, but also in several others, does the Pen ts'ao lean mu exhibit many discrepancies from the Wu yin tien edition; this subject should merit closer study. In the present case there is only one other point • worthy of special mention; and this is, that Li Si-ben, in his section of nomenclature,

gives the synonyme   fan tsao ("foreign jujube") with reference to the Lin
piao lu i. This term, however, does not occur in the text of this work as transmitted by him, or in the Wu yin tien edition. The latter has added a saying of the Emperor Wen 3Z of the Wei dynasty, which has nothing to do with the date, and in which is found the phrase )j,,~ fan tsao (" all jujubes"). In other editions, fan ("foreign") was perhaps substituted for this fan, so that the existence of the synonyme established by Li and adopted by Bretschneider appears to be very doubtful.

2 See below, p. 478.

= It is singular that Bretschneider, who has given a rather uncritical digest of the subject from the Pen ts'ao, does not at all mention this transplantation of the tree. To my mind, this is the most interesting point to be noted. Whether date-palms are still grown in Kwan-tun, I am not prepared to say; but, as foreign authors do not mention the fact, I almost doubt it.

4 Origin of Cultivated Plants, p. 303.

5 Pen ts'ao lean mu, Ch. 31, p. 8.