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
456 SING-IRANICA
According to STUART,' this plant is found in the province of Yûnnan and on the western borders of Se-6`wan, but whether indigenous or transplanted is uncertain. If it should not occur in other parts of China, it is more likely that it came from India, especially as Yûn-nan has of old been in contact with India and abounds in plants introduced from there.
~ 6 A52 *a-sar(sat)-na (Sui Su), EJit, a-sie-na (Wei Su,
Ch. 102, p. 9), is not explained. There is no doubt that this word represents the transcription of an Iranian, more specifically Sogdian, name; but the Sogdian terms for aromatics are still unknown to us. Hypothetical restorations of the name are *asarna, axsarna, asna.
Storax, an aromatic substance (now obtained from Liquidambar orientalis; in ancient times, however, from Styrax officinalis), is first mentioned by Herodotus3 as imported into Hellas by the Phoenicians. It is styled by the Chinese it su-ho, *su-gap (giep), su-gab (Japanese sugô), being mentioned both in the Wei lio and in the Han Annals as a product of the Hellenistic Orient (Ta Ts`in) .4 It is said there, "They mix a number of aromatic substances and extract from
them the sap by boiling, which is made into su-ho" (â 4f -i
o u' ) .5 It is notable that this clause opens and ends with
the same word ho 1; and it would thus not be impossible that the explanation is merely the result of punning on the term su-ho, which is doubtless the transcription of a foreign word. Aside from this semasiological interpretation, we have a geographical theory expressed in the Kwan ci, written prior to A.D. 527, as follows: "Su-ho is produced in the country Ta Ts`in; according to others, in the country Su-ho. The natives of this country gather it and press the juice out of it to make it into an aromatic, fatty substance. What is sold are the sediments
j Chinese Materia Medica, p. 278.
2 This character is not in K`an-hi. It appears again on the same page of the
Sui u ( 4 b) in the name of the river *Na-mit j , (Zaraf gan) in the kingdom
Nan , and on p. 4 a in s RI, the country Na-se-po (*Na-sek-pwa; accord-
ing to CHAVANNES, Documents sur les Tou-kiue, p. 146, Nakhsab or Nasaf). On pp. 6 b and 7 a the river Na-mit is written . Cf. also CHAVANNES and PELLIOT, Traité manichéen, pp. 58, 191.
3 III, 107.
4 Hou Han Su, Ch. 118, pp. 4 b-5 a. E. H. PARKER (China Review, Vol. XV, p. 372) indicates in an anecdote relative to Cwan-tse that he preferred the dung-beetle's dung-roll to a piece of storax, and infers that indirect intercourse with western Asia must have begun as early as the fourth century B.C., when Cwah-tse flourished. The source for this story is not stated, and it may very well be a product of later times.
5 The Sü Han Su gives the same text with the variant, "call it su-ho."
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