National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

But there may be a third reason, to wit that Persia produced a drug which was not camphor
proper, but reminded of it. In Ibn Baytār's important notice on camphor (LECLERC, Traité des
simples, in Not. et Extr., XXVI, I, 127-131), there is a passage mentioning, among the places of
production of camphor, Sofāla, which, without the addition « of India », may be the one on the eastern
coast of Africa (cf. Fe, 95, 112, 288; HEYD, II, 591, is in favour of Sofāla = Supāra in India). This
camphor of Sofāla may have been extracted from a tree which was not the Dryobalanops. The
same thing may have occurred in Persia. The Pên-ts'ao kang-mu (34, 62) has preserved a notice
on a tree called 元 慈 勒 yüan-tz'ü-lo which was given in the lost Pên-ts'ao shih-i of 陳 藏 器
Ch'ên Tsang-ch'i, a Ning-po man who lived in the first half of the 8th cent. The notice begins
with saying that the yüan-tz'ü-lo « is produced in the kingdom of Po-ssŭ; it looks like the 'dragon-
brain perfume'; it is the 'grease' (脂 chih) inside a tree »; it is used in much the same way as camphor,
in particular against cataract. One may be surprised that LAUFER should not have adduced this
camphor-like product of Po-ssŭ in favour of his « Malayan Po-ssŭ »; perhaps the name of the product
stopped him. Yüan-tz'ü-lo clearly is a transcription, and no less clearly is corrupt: yüan, followed
by tz'ü, gives a combination which is phonetically impossible. The most natural correction is
to read 兀 wu instead of 元 yüan, and wu-tz'ü-lo is *nguot-tz'i-lak; this would suppose an original
like *uzrak. Now, one of the kinds of camphor mentioned by Ibn Baytār is ازرق azraq (LECLERC,
127; Fe, 288). In Arabic, زرق zurqah means « blue color », azraq, pl. زرق zurq, means « blue »;
this is the reason why FERRAND, with a question mark, rendered azraq as « blue camphor »; it will
be seen further on that this finds a curious counterpart in later Chinese sources. I cannot be
certain that yüan-tz'ü-lo < *wu-tz'ü-lo is azraq, but there is a fair chance that it is so, and here
again we must think either of a camphor-like drug produced in Persia, or of camphor brought
on Persian ships, which so came to be known to the Chinese under an Arabic name, probably used
also by the Persians.
Sumatra was the great camphor producing country in the early Middle Ages; so it is surprising
that I-ching, who was in Sumatra towards the end of the 7th cent., should say that « in the Southern
Seas, a little camphor (lung-nao) is produced » (cf. TAKAKUSU, A Record of the Buddhist Religion,
129). Camphor (lung-nao) is also mentioned on TAKAKUSU's p. 48. Moreover, on p. 45, it is
not certain that we must correct 片 子 香 油 p'ien tzŭ hsiang yu into 附 子 香 油 fu-tzŭ hsiang-yu
as TAKAKUSU did; p'ien-tzŭ hsiang yu may be « oil of the flake perfume », i. e. « camphor oil ».
It is only under the Sung dynasty that we get more precise data on the Chinese termino-
logy concerning camphor. In 977, the king of Po-ni (Borneo) sent an embassy which offered to
the Chinese Emperor « one katī (家 底 chia-ti) of camphor in great flakes (大 片 龍 腦 ta-p'ien
lung-nao), eight katī of the second class (ti-êrh-têng) [of camphor], eleven katī of the third
class (ti-san-têng), twenty katī of « rice camphor » (米 龍 腦 mi lung-nao), and twenty katī of
«bluish camphor» (茶 龍 腦 ts'ang lung-nao); every katī was equivalent to twenty ounces (liang).»
This example of the Indonesian katī, our « catty », ought to be added to Hobson-Jobson², 175,
where the earliest example is almost six centuries later. In the rest of the tribute, there were « five
boards (pan) of camphor [wood] » (cf. Sung shih, 489, 8 a; GROENEVELDT, Notes on the Malay
Archipelago, 230). It will be noticed that, judging from this text, there were three classes of
« flake camphor », followed by « rice camphor » and « bluish camphor ». Mi means « husked