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THE DIAMOND 



A Study in Chinese and Hellenistic Folk-Lore 



Introductory. — Of all the wonders and treasures of the Hellenistic- 

 Roman Orient, it was the large variety of beautiful precious stones that 

 created the most profound and lasting impression on the minds of the 

 Chinese. During the time of their early antiquity the number of gems 

 known to them was exceedingly limited, and mainly restricted to certain 

 untransparent, colored stones fit for carving; while the transparent 

 jewel with its qualities of lustre, cut, polished, and set ready for wearing, 

 was a matter wholly unknown to them. Only contact with Hellenistic 

 civilization and with India opened their eyes to this new world, and 

 together with the new commodities a stream of Occidental folk-lore 

 poured into the valleys of China. That a chapter from a series of 

 discussions devoted to Chinese- Hellenistic relations 1 is taken up by a 

 detailed study of the history of the diamond, is chiefly because this 

 very subject affords a most instructive example of the diffusion of 

 classical ideas to the Farthest East. The mind of the Chinese offered 

 a complete blank in this respect, being unacquainted with the diamond, 

 and was therefore easily susceptible to the reception of foreign notions 

 along this line. 2 India was the distributing-centre of diamonds to 

 western Asia, Hellas and Rome, on the one hand, and to south-eastern 



1 Two other contributions along this line have thus far been published: The 

 Story of the Pinna and the Syrian Lamb (Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. XXVIII, 

 1915, pp. 103-128) and Asbestos and Salamander (T'oung Pao, 1915, pp. 297-371). 



1 Geerts (Les produits de la nature japonaise et chinoise, p. 201) stated in 1878 

 that the diamond had not yet been found in China or Japan. Diamonds have been 

 discovered in Shan-tung Province only during recent years (compare A. A. Fauvel, 

 Les diamants chinois, Comptes-rendus Soc. de I'industrie miniire, 1899, pp. 271-281; 

 Chinese Diamonds, Mines and Minerals, Vol. XXIII, 1902-03, p. 552). The late 

 F. H. Chalfant (in the work Shantung, the Sacred Province of China, ed. by 

 Forsyth, p. 346) gives this account: "Fifty-five /* south-east of I-chou-fu he the 

 diamond fields. The stones are found on the low watershed between two streams, 

 distributed through a very shallow soil over a reddish sandstone conglomerate. A 

 determined effort was made by the same German company that operated the gold 

 mine near I-chou, to develop the diamond field, but the enterprise was not a com- 

 mercial success. It is the opinion of the German experts that the stones were 

 deposited in their present position by the action of water at the time when, according 

 to the theory, there was a connection between the two rivers. It is supposed that 

 the source of the supply is somewhere in the mountains of M6ng-yin. Meanwhile, 

 diamonds, some of them of very good quality, are constantly picked up at the locality 

 described and occasionally at other points." The mines were abandoned by the 



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