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
THE MALAYAN PO-SE--ALUM 475
and Ta Ts'in. J. L. SOUBEIRAN1 says, L'alun, qui était tiré primitivement de la Perse, est aujourd'hui importé de l'Occident." F. DE MALY2 translates the term Po-se tee fan by "fan violet de Perse." All this is wrong. HIRTH3 noted the difficulty in the case, as alum is not produced in Persia, but principally in Asia Minor. Pliny4 mentions Spain, Egypt, Armenia, Macedonia, Pontus, and Africa as alum-producing countries. Hirth found in the Pei wen yün fu a passage from the Hai
yao pen ts'ao, according to which Po-se fan ' (" Persian alum,"
as he translates) comes from Ta Ts'in. In his opinion, "Persian alum" is a misnomer, Persia denoting in this case merely the emporium from which the product was shipped to China. The text in question is not peculiar to the Hai yao pen ts`ao of the eighth century, but occurs at a much earlier date in the Kwan èou ki E 1'I'I E, an account of Kwarntun, written under the Tsin dynasty (A.D. 265-419), when the name of Persia was hardly known in China. This work, as quoted in the Cell lei pen tstao,5 states that kin sien ik fan (" alum with gold threads") is produced in the country Po-se, and in another paragraph that the white alum of Po-se (Po-se pai fan) comes from Ta Ts`in.s The former statement clearly alludes to the alum discolored by impurities, as still found in several localities of India and Upper Burma.7 Accordingly the Malayan Po-se (for this one only can come into question here) produced an impure kind of alum, and simultaneously was the transit mart for the pure white alum brought from western Asia by way of India to China. It is clear that, because the native alum of Po-se was previously known, also the West-Asiatic variety was named for Po-se. A parallel to the Po-se fan is the Ktun-lun fan, which looks like black mud.'
61. The Wu lu 5t it, written by Can Po 4A in the beginning of the fourth century, contains the following text on the subject of "ant-
lac" (yi tsi ) :9 "In the district of Kü-fun IL (in Kiu-ben, Ton-
1 Etudes sur la matière médicale chinoise (Minéraux), p. 2 (reprint from Journal de pharmacie et de chimie, 1866).
2 Lapidaire chinois, p. 26o.
3 Chinesische Studien, p. 257.
4 XXXV, 52.
b Ch. 3, p. 40 b.
6 Also in the text of the Hai yao pen ts'ao, as reproduced in the Pen ts'ao lean mu (Ch. II, p. 15 b), two Po-se alums are distinguished.
7 WATT, Commercial Products of India, p. 61. $ Pen ts'ao lean mu, 1. c.
Tai p'in hwan yü ki, Ch. 171, p. 5.
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