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
518 SING-IRANICA
se-se of the Tang really were, that the Tang se-se were apparently lost in the age of the Sung, and that substitutes merely designated by that name were then in vogue.
Under the Yüan or Mongol dynasty the word se-se was revived. C`an Te, the envoy who visited Bagdad in 1259, reported se-se among the precious stones of the Caliph, together with pearls, lapis lazuli, and diamonds. A stone of small or no value, found in Kin-cou (in Sen-kin, Manchuria), was styled se-se;' and under the reign of the Emperor C`en-tsun (1295-1307) we hear that two thousand five hundred catties of se-se were palmed off on officials in lieu of cash payments, a practice which was soon stopped by imperial command.2 Under the Ming, se-se was merely a word vaguely conveying the notion of a precious stone of the past, and transferred to artifacts like beads of colored glass or clay.'
The Chinese notices of se-se form a striking analogy to the accounts of the ancients regarding the emerald (smaragdos), which on the one hand is described as a precious stone, chiefly used for rings, on the other hand as a building-stone. Theophrastus4 states, " The emerald is good for the eyes, and is worn as a ring-stone to be looked at. It is rare, however, and not large. Yet it is said in the histories of the Egyptian kings that a Babylonian king once sent as a gift an emerald of four cubits in length and three cubits in width; there is in the temple of Jupiter an obelisk composed of four emeralds, forty cubits high, four cubits wide, and two cubits thick. The false emerald occurs in well-known places, particularly in the copper-mines of Cyprus, where it fills lodes crossing one another in many ways, but only seldom is it large enough for rings." H. O. LENZ5 is inclined to understand by the latter kind malachite. Perhaps the se-se of Iran and Tibet was the emerald; the se-se used for pillars in Fu-lin, malachite. No Chinese definition of what se-se was has as yet come to light, and we have to await further information before venturing exact and positive identifications.
In Buddhist literature the emerald appears in the transcription
mo-lo-k`ie-t`o PZ,6 corresponding to Sanskrit marakata. In the
transcription cu-mu-la, in the seventeenth century written
fi tsu-mu-lü, the emerald appears to be first mentioned in the
1 Yüan Si, Ch. 24, p. 2 b.
a Ibid., Ch. 21, p. 7 b.
E Cf. Notes on Turquois, P. 34.
4 De lapidibus, 42.
6 Mineralogie der Griechen und Römer, p. 20.
6 Fan yi min yi tsi, Ch. 8, p. 14 b.
-• J~
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