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purifies it entirely. If it be broken, it is repaired by means of goat milk boiled underneath». Part
of this curious text is clearly independent from Polo, and it is not even certain that it owes him the
«forty years» of maturation of the clay, or even the sentence on fathers and sons; these may have
belonged to the stock-in-trade of the Near East, where Polo too perhaps heard them rather than in
China and from Chinese. As shown by the remark on the name «Chim», the information was
gathered on Persian soil, and the «noblemen» who drink from the vessels were probably those of
the Near East, since in China everybody could do it. John, archbishop of Sultanieh (Sulṭāniyyah),
who, in 1403, wrote a memoir on Tamerlane and his Court, says in like fashion : «Cin, Machin, which
are provinces where rhubarb grows, and where the beautiful bowls are found which are brought to
Genoa, and the earth of which they are made is said to be kept forty years» (H. MORANVILLÉ, in
Bibl. Ec. des Chartes, LV, [1894], p. 16 of the reprint). The explanation of porcellanum from the
«herb», i. e. from the «purslane», though it finds a slight counterpart in the «Lochac» chapter of some
Polian Mss., is not derived from them, and represents an independent interpretation. Though it is
of course a mistake, it can be accounted for only if we remember that most of the porcelain which went
abroad in the Middle Ages was not a white ware, but the green «celadon» (see «Tingiu»). Chinese
texts often speak of vessels which detect or ward off poison, for instance those made of rhinoceros
horn, but I do not remember that the same property has been ascribed by them to porcelain. But,
curiously enough, they speak of the efficaciousness against poison of cowries (see «Cowry», t. I, p. 542)
i. e. of «porcelain» taken in its primitive sense. The belief spread in the West. In the Inventory
of Florimond Robertet, dated 1532, porcelain (in its meaning of china-ware) is said to be «so sound
(saine) that, if traders should soil it with poison to harm anybody, it would instantly break of itself
and fall to pieces rather than tolerate the evil beverage which was meant to injure our inside». The
great Robert Estienne, writing in 1536, recalls that he saw porcelains in Venice and heard that they
«never would accept poison» (cf. GAY, Glossaire archéologique, II, 258). This notion seems to have
been evolved in the Near East. I do not know of any parallel for the repair of broken porcelain
by means of boiling goats milk.

Polo says that vessels of Chinese porcelain were «carried throughout the world». HEYD (II,
679) took exception to this and declared it to be a certain error, since, «in all likelihood», china-ware
had not yet reached Europe in Polo's day. I am not certain that HEYD's stricture does not go beyond
the mark. First of all, it is a fact that, in Polo's time, Chinese porcelain was extensively exported
to the various countries of Asia and the eastern coast of Africa, which is already an ample justifica-
tion of the words used by the traveller. Moreover, «in all likelihood» is no proof, and it may very
well be that some porcelain, already known perhaps under this name, had reached Europe before
the end of the 13th cent. Porcelain had been correctly described by the Arabian traveller Sulaymān
in the middle of the 9th cent. (cf. FERRAND, Voyage du marchand arabe Sulayman, 54; J. SAUVA-
GET, Relation de la Chine et de l'Inde, 16, 57). By the middle of the 12th cent., Abū'l-'Abbās
had «Chinese bowls and vases» (? or «bowls and vases of China [i. e. porcelain]»), «the substance of
which equalled in beauty corindon of the kind called al-muḥarram» (FERRAND, in JA, 1925, I, 262).
It seems incredible that none of the crusaders or the European traders who went to the East should
have seen any such vases and brought back any of them to their native lands.

Having under our eyes Polo's French text where china-ware is called «porcelaine», we can but