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
512 SINO—IRANICA
swi ki 4.ß i , written in the sixth century, the needles used
by women on the festival of the seventh day of the seventh month' were made of gold, silver, or t'ou-§i.2 Under the Tang, t`ou-§i was an officially adopted alloy, being employed, for instance, for the girdles of the officials of the eighth and ninth grades.' It was sent as tribute from Iranian regions; for instance, in A.D. 718, from Maimargh (northwest of Samarkand) .4
The Ko ku yao lun states, " T `ou-i is the essence of natural copper. At present zinc-bloom is smelted to make counterfeit t'ou. According to Ts`ui Fan V DA, one catty of copper and one catty of zinc-bloom will yield t'ou-. i. The genuine t'ou is produced in Persia. It looks like gold, and, when fired, assumes a red color which will never turn black." This is clearly a description of brass which is mainly composed of copper and zinc. Li Si-6en5 identifies t'ou-§i with the modern term hwan t`un (" yellow copper"); that is, brass. According to T`an Ts`ui,6 t`ou-.i is
found in the C`ö-li * t`u-se of Yün-nan.
The Chinese accounts of t'ou or t`ou-. i agree with what the Persians and Arabs report about tütiya. It was in Persia that zinc was first mined, and utilized for a new copper alloy, brass. Ibn al-Fagih, who wrote about A.D. 902, has left a description of the zinc-mines situated in a mountain Dunbawand in the province of Kirman. The ore was (and still is) a government monopoly.' Jawbari, who wrote about 1225, has described the process of smelting.' The earliest mention of the term occurs in the Arabic stone-book of Pseudo-Aristotle (ninth century),9 where the stone tütiya is explained as belonging to the stones found in mines, with numerous varieties which are white, yellow, and green;
Si is only said to resemble gold, and the notion that brass resembles gold turns up in all Oriental writers. See also BEAL, Records of the Western World, Vol. I, p. 51; and CHAVANNES (T'oung Pao, 1904, p. 34), who likewise accepts the only admissible interpretation, "brass."
1 Cf. W. GRUBE, Zur Pekinger Volkskunde, p. 76; J. PRZYLUSKI, T'oung Pao, 1914, p. 215. a
Pei wen yün fu, Ch. I00 A, p. 25.
3 Jade, p. 286; cf. also Ta ran leu tien, Ch. 8, p. 22. Q CHAVANNES, T'oung Pao, 1904, p. 34.
5 Pen ts'ao lean mu, Ch. 8, pp. 3 and 4. Cf. also GEERTS, Produits, p. 575.
6 Tien hai yü hen ci, Ch. 2, p. 3 b.
7 P. SCHWARZ, Iran im Mittelalter, p. 252.
8 G. FERRAND, Textes relatifs à l'Extrême-Orient, p. 610 (cf. also pp. 225, 228; and LECLERC, Traité des simples, Vol. I, p. 322).
J. RUSKA, Steinbuch des Aristoteles, p. 175. J. BECKMANN (Beytrâge zur Geschichte der Erfindungen, Vol. III, p. 388) states that the word first occurs in Avicenna of the eleventh century.
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