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
394 SING-IRANICA
Emperor T`ai Tsui' that all tributary nations should present their choicest vegetable products. Yûan Wen A 3C, an author of the Sung period, in his work Wen yu kien p`in 414 011 i',1 states that the spinach (po-lin) comes from (or is produced in) the country Ni-p`o-lo (Nepal) in the Western Regions.2 The Kia yu pen ts`ao, compiled in A.D. 1057, is the first Materia Medica that introduced the spinach into the pharmacopeeia.3
The colloquial name is po ts'ai 'ir 4k ("po vegetable "), po being
abbreviated for po-lin. According to Wan Si-mou It (who died
in z591), in his Kwa su su J4 tk, at, the current name in northern China is c`i ken tstai fic 54 ("red-root vegetable"). The Kwan k`ün fan p`u uses also the term yin-wu tstai ("parrot vegetable "), named for the root, which is red, and believed to resemble a parrot. Aside from the term Po-se tstai, the Pen tstao kan mu 3i i4 gives the synonymes hun
ts'ai i ("red vegetable ") and yan tstai (" foreign vegetable ").
Another designation is .an-hu tstai (" coral vegetable ") .
A rather bad joke is perpetrated by the Min 3'14 , a description
of Fu-kien Province written at the end of the sixteenth or beginning of the seventeenth centuary, where the name po-lin is explained as igz it po lei' ("waves and edges "), because the leaves are shaped like wave-patterns and have edges. There is nothing, of course, that the Chinese could not etymologize.'
There is no account in the traditions of the Tang and Sung periods to the effect that the spinach was derived from Persia; and in view of the recent origin of the term "Persian vegetable," which is not even explained, we are tempted at the outset to dismiss the theory of a Persian origin. STUART' even goes so far as to say that, "as the Chinese have a ten,dency to attribute everything that comes from the southwest to Persia, we are not surprised to find this called Po-se ts`ao, 'Per-
Ch. 4, p. i i b (ed. of Wu yin tien, 1775).
2 a NfAZIVIN M. This could be translated also, "in the
Western Regions and in the country Ni-p`o-lo."
3 ei wu min Si t'u k'ao, Ch. 4, p. 38 b.
4 Ch. 8, p. 87 b.
5 Of greater interest is the following fact recorded in the same book. The spinach in the north of China is styled "bamboo (cu 1) po-lin," with long and
bitter stems; that of Fu-kien is termed "stone (si ) po-lin," and has short and
sweet stems.—The Min su, in 154 chapters, was written by Ho K'iao-yuan ~f j from Tsin-kiain in Fu-kien; he obtained the degree of tsin Si in 1586 (cf. Cat. of the Imperial Library, Ch. 74, p. 19).
6 Chinese Materia Medica, p. 417.
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