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Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 |
470 183. COTTON Mai (I-chien chih, end of ch. 45) describes what he himself shows to be seeds of ts'io-chia, i. e. Gleditschia chinensis, which have certainly nothing to do with the true so-lo tree. More definite is the use of so-lo as a designation of the t'ien-shi li, « Celes- perhaps more regularly written! so-lo, but this is not certain; %' J so-to-tzic is a common form of the same name, and all quotations mentioning a ? ' so-lo tree are referred to the form tit so-lo for what he intended to be the Indian sala tree, Shorea robusta. As a matter Aesculus turbinata, is known to the Japanese as tochi-no-ki (Ch. ch'i-yeh shu, « tree with tree with seven leaves ' (ch'i-yeh shu) of the Ting-li-yüan » (at Lo-yang), but in the poem itself the tree is called so-lo (cf. T'u-shu chi-ch'êng, ts'ao-mu tien, 309, i-wên, 3 a). The old Chiang-ning fu-chih speaks also of ch'i-yeh shu in temples of the Nanking region and considers them as so-lo trees (ibid. 309, tsa-lu, 2); two more quotations are given in Pen-ts'ao kang-mu shih-i, 7, 71 b. It is also an Aesculus which is described as « flower of the so-lo tree » in the Tsao-lin tsa-tsu, chung chi, 54 a, with the alternative name hao-ling, « crane feathers ». In his Ch'i-hsiu lei- kao (40, 3 b-4 a), Lang Ying opposes the common belief that the so-lo tree was the )J rfr yiieh- chung kuei (« moon cinnamon », Litsea glauca), since it was in fact the ch'i-yeh tree (mu). This identification of the so-lo tree with the Aesculus chinensis also occurs in a notice in which so-lo trees are mentioned on the T'ien-t'ai Mountain in Chê-chiang, and these trees had only « six or seven leaves » at the end of each branch (T'u-shu chi-ch'êng, ibid. 309, chi-shih, 2 a). We are now prepared to approach the problem of so-lo as a designation of a «cotton tree ». WAITERS was first, I believe, to say that, in the latter sense, so-lo represented salmali, the Indian name of the silk-cotton tree (Essays on the Chinese language, 435). He even went as | ||
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