国立情報学研究所 - ディジタル・シルクロード・プロジェクト
『東洋文庫所蔵』貴重書デジタルアーカイブ

are said to have issued from Wang Mêng's back; moreover, the Kingdom of Men is stated in a lost
sentence to lie 20,000 miles off (i. e. west of) the famous Yü-men, « Jade gate », in western Kan-su.
The « two sons » of the tale seem to be due to the idea that, except for the first ancestor, two parents
were necessary to have children, even if these parents be of the same sex as in the Kingdom of Men.
In the same way, two women lived together in the Kingdom of Women.
There are counterparts in Indian and Mussulman folklore to the « Kingdom of Men » and the
« Kingdom of Women » leading separate lives; but more often men and women, like those of
Polo's Male and Female Islands, met at a certain time of the year. The tradition reported by Kuo
P'o, according to which pregnancy was the result of a bath in a certain lake or spring, was also known
in Maṣrib, i. e. in north-western Africa (cf. FERRAND, in JA, 1925, II, 47).
The Kingdom of Men and the Kingdom of Women are placed by the Shan-hai ching among the
countries « outside the seas » to the west of China; but the 書傳 Su-shên occur in the same enumera-
tion both in the Huai-nan-tzŭ and the Shan-hai ching, and Kao Yu's commentary on the first work
locates the Su-shên north of the present region of Peking. This puzzled Pt Yüan, who wondered
whether there was not another Su-shên in the west; he does not seem to have noticed that, in spite of
Kao Yu's commentary, the Su-shên of the Huai-nan-tzŭ too were in the west. Kao Yu's commentary
is based on the mistaken identification in Han times of the half-fabulous ancient Su-shên with tribes
in Manchuria (see « Ciorcia »). I quite admit that the location of all these legendary nations to the
west of China is sometimes surprising. In the case of the Kingdom of Men, however, the story in
Kuo P'o's commentary, which makes the ancestor first pass the place of the « Mother Queen of the
West », bears evidence to the existence of a legend, more detailed than those that have reached us,
which concerned a « Kingdom of Men » in the further west. The enumeration in the Huai-nan-
tzŭ being from north-west to south-west, followed by another from south-east to south-east, it would
seem that, under the first Han dynasty, the Women Folk and the Men Folk were in fact conceived
as being to the north-west of China. It is hard to say whether there can be here any connection with
the western traditions concerning the Amazons, still more, in view of the great interval in space and
time, whether the early mediaeval tradition of a Terra Feminarum « east of the eastern sea » in
northern Europe may be adduced as a parallel. On this Terra Feminarum of Adam of Bremen
(c. 1085) and the sixth-century text of pseudo-Zachariah the Rhetor, cf. Adam von Bremen Ham-
burg. Kirchengeschichte, ed. B. SCHMEIDLER, 1917, 157, 242, 244, 246-7; Hist. Eccles. Zachariae
Rhetori adsor., ed. E. W. BROCKES, 1924, II, 145; MARQUART, Osteurop. u. ostasiat. Streifzüge,
355, sq.; WESTBERG, in Zurnal' Min. Nar. Prosv., 1908, 376; also his papers Ibrāhim ibn-Ja'ḳūb's
Reisebericht, in Zap. Imp. Ak. Nauk, Series VIII, Vol. III, 88-89, 136-159; Zur Wanderung der Longo-
barden, ibid., Vol. VI, 1-5; LAUFER, in Aufsätze... Ernst Kuhn... gewidmet, 305; TALLGREN, Idriṡî, La
Finlande, Helsinki, 1930, 34, 38, 77, 140; Mi, 191. Of the tales referring to this Terra Feminarum
in north-eastern Europe, I shall only mention the fact that the women were supposed to conceive by
drinking water (virginum terra quae gustu aquae concipere protestatae sunt; also eas aquae gustu
dicunt aliqui concipere, cf. Adam v. B., 246-7), and that, according to Adam of Bremen (op. cit., 247),
the women of the Terra Feminarum gave birth to boys who had dogs, heads or to girls who were
beautiful (cf. Y, III, 110); two features which betray a combination of two originally different tales.
In the above notes on a « Kingdom of Women » to the north-west of China, I have provisionally