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| 0496 |
Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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it is eagerly collected, women sit at their looms, and chi-pei is woven for the new white clothes
of the husbands. Chi-pei has never been the name of Bombax malabaricum, and the latter
was never and could never have been used for making cloth, but only as stuffing for
mattresses, etc. So Wang Kuang-yang's pan-chih hua ought to be Gossypium arboreum; but
Wang may have misapplied the term, and I must admit that the colour of the flowers and the
time of their opening would rather suggest the Bombax.
In speaking of errors in the names of plants, Lu Jung, a doctor of 1466, has the following
passage in his Shu-yüan tsa-chi (Shou-shan-ko ts'ung-shu ed., 12, 10a) : «The tree-cotton-flower
(mu-mien-hua) grows in Nan-yüeh (= Kuang-tung and Kuang-hsi); it is a tree four or five chang
high (= 40 to 50 feet); the flower is red like the camelia (山茶 shan-ch'a, Camelia japonica);
the seeds (tzŭ) are like the fruit (shih) of the ch'u (Broussonetia papyrifera); floss (mien) is
produced in the seeds, and can be used to stuff cushions; it is what the people of Su-chou (in
Chiang-su) call p'an-chih-hua. What is spun and woven to make cloth should be called «cotton-
flower» (mien-hua) only; the 雲間通志 Yün-chien t'ung-chih (a monograph on Sung-chiang in
Chiang-su) calls it mu-mien-hua; it must be that it follows the error of Master 蔡 Ts'ai (= Ts'ai
Ch'ên, the commentator of the Shu ching, on whom cf. infra, p. 487).»
In his Tan-ch'ien hsü lu (Pao-yen-t'ang pi-chi lith. ed., 8, 2b), Yang Shên (1488-1559) has
a brief note on mu-mien, more or less similar to that of Lu Jung. He first quotes two poems
of the 9th cent. in which the expression «mu-mien flowers» occurs, then describes the mu-mien
tree of the south, an armful in girth, with red flowers like the camelia and yellow pistils, states
that it was not planted in Chiang-nan, and maintains that it is the «mu-mien tree» of the Wu lu
(cf. supra, p. 460). He goes on to say : «This is the pan-chih hua of our days. It grows in
A-mi-chou in Yün-nan(N. N.W. of Mêng-tzŭ), and is extremely abundant in Ling-nan (= Kuang-
tung and Kuang-hsi).» We have seen that the «mu-mien tree» of the Wu-lu was Gossypium
arboreum. But Lu Jung and Yang Shên's description is that of mu-mien in the sense in which
mu-mien was used in Kuang-tung, where it was the name of Bombax malabaricum. Conse-
quently Yang Shên's identification of the «mu-mien tree» of the Wu lu is erroneous. At the
same time, Lu Jung and Yang Shên must have known what was meant by pan-chih hua in their
own days, at least in some parts of China, and they clearly understood Bombax malabaricum.
In spite of the fact that a lofty tree like the Bombax can hardly have been from the first known
under the misleading name of «flower», and also that the pan-chih hua in Wang Kuang-yang's
song ought to be Gossypium arboreum, we must admit that the same change of meaning which
obtained in Kuang-tung for mu-mien also took place in the case of pan-chih hua, and that what
may originally have been a name of Gossypium arboreum was, at a slightly later date, used for the
Bombax malabaricum.
The 閩 郡 疏 Min-pu shu is a short miscellany devoted to Fu-chien, and mainly to its
products; it was published in 1585 by 王 世 懋 Wang Shih-mou, a native of T'ai-ts'ang in
Chiang-su, and contains a curious passage on the cultivation of cotton (Chieh-yüeh-shan-fang
ed., 7b; cf. also T'u-shu chi-ch'êng, ts'ao-mu tien, 303, tsa-lu, 1-2) : «I had formerly heard from
old men that the people of Kuang[-tung] planted cotton (棉 花 mien-hua) which reached six or
seven feet in height and that there were some [bushes] which were not changed (易 i) for four or
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