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
494 SING-IRANICA
In the Tang Annals we read that in the beginning of the period K`ai-yüan (A.D. 713-741) the country of K`ain (Sogdiana), an Iranian region, sent as tribute to the Chinese Court coats-of-mail, cups of rock-crystal, bottles of agate, ostrich-eggs, textiles styled yüe no, dwarfs, and dancing-girls of Hu-süan Mi fir (Xwarism).1 In the Ts`e fu yüan kwei the date of this event is more accurately fixed in the year 718.2 The Man gu, written by Fan Co of the Tang period, about A.D. 86o,3 men-
tions yüe no as a product of the Small Po-lo-men pFJ (Brah-
mana) country, which was conterminous with Piao (Burma) and
Mi-e`en (*Miden) 111 1f.4 This case offers a parallel to the presence of tie in the Ai-lao country in Yün-nan.
1^,;. The Annals of the Sung mention yüe no as exported by the Arabs into China.' The Lin wai tai ta,6 written by Cou K`ü-fei in 1178, mentions white yüe-no stuffs in the countries of the Arabs, in Bagdad, and yüe-no stuffs in the country Mi I.
HIRTH7 was the first to reveal the term yüe no in Cao 2u-kwa, who attributes white stuffs of this name to Bagdad. His transcription yiütnok, made on the basis of Cantonese, has no value for the phonetic restoration of the name, and his hypothetical identification with cuttanee must be rejected; but as to his collocation of the second element with Marco Polo's nac, he was on the right trail. He was embarrassed, however, by the first element yüe, "which can in no way be explained from Chinese and yet forms part of the foreign term." Hence in his complete translation of the work' he admits that the term cannot as yet be identified. His further statement, that in the passage of the T `an . u, quoted above, the question is possibly of a country yiie-no (Bukhara), rests on a misunderstanding of the text, which speaks only of a textile or textiles. The previous failures in explaining the term simply result from the fact that no serious attempt was made to restore
1 Cf. CHAVANNES, Documents sur les Tou-kiue occidentaux, pp. 136, 378, with the rectification of PELLIOT (Bull. de l'Ecole française, Vol. IV, 1904, p. 483).
Regarding the dances of Hu-süan, see Kin Si hwi yuan kiao k'an ki 70
(p. 3), Critical Annotations on the Kin Si hwi yuan by Li aii-kiao of the Sung (in Ki fu ts'un Su, t'ao Io).
2 CHAVANNES, T'oung Pao, 1904, p. 35.
3 See above, p. 468.
4 Man Su, P. 44 b (ed. of Yün-nan pei cen ei). Regarding Mi-d'en, see PELLIOT, Bull. de l'Ecole française, Vol. IV, p. 171.
5 Sun Si, Ch. 490; and BRETSCHNEIDER, Knowledge possessed by the Chinese of the Arabs, p. 12. Bretschneider admitted that this product was unknown to him.
s Ch. 3, pp. 2-3.
7 Lander des Islam, p. 42 (Leiden, 1894).
8 Chau Ju-kua, p. 220.
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