8 The Diamond 



Professor Hirth, a lifetime student of the complex Fu-lin problem, 1 

 encountered the first notices of Fu-lin in the Annals of the T'ang 

 Dynasty, and an incidental reference to it in the Annals of the Sui 

 Dynasty, written between 629 and 636, thus tracing the first appearance 

 of the name to the first half of the seventh century. Chavannes 2 

 called attention to a text written in 607, in which Fu-lin is mentioned, 

 with reference to a passage translated by him from the Ts'e fu yuan 

 kuei, where the name is written in the same manner as in our text 

 above. 3 The latter distinctly relates to the period T'ien-kien (502-520), 

 and, further, is chronologically determined through the mention of 

 the Liang Emperor Wu. Accordingly we are here confronted with the 

 earliest allusion to the country Fu-lin in the beginning of the sixth 

 century. The fact that the well-known Fu-lin discussed by Hirth and 

 Chavannes, and no other, is involved in this passage, is evidenced by 

 the very contents of the text, which, as will be demonstrated presently, 

 harbors a tradition emanating from the Hellenistic Orient. It is notable 

 that our text writes the second element of the name jf$» instead of 

 $Jl, as the later documents do; it is obvious that a popular inter- 

 pretation is intended here, the "forest" (Jin) of the jewels being read 

 into Fu-lin: as if it were "forest of Fu." This is not the place to 

 revive the much-ventilated question of the etymology of this name, 

 or to take sides with the interpretations proposed by Hirth and Cha- 

 vannes; 4 but brief reference should be made to the recent theory of 

 Pelliot, 5 according to whom the word Fu-lin is the product of the 

 name Rom, prompted by a supposed intermediary form From, which 

 issued from Armenian Hrom or Horom and Pahlavi Hrom. Pelliot 

 thinks also that the name Fu-lin appears in China with certainty 

 around 550, and that it is possibly still older, which perfectly har- 

 monizes with the result obtained from the above text. 



The story about the capture of the precious stones is almost enig- 

 matical in its terse brevity, but it at once becomes intelligible if we 

 recognize it as an abridged form of a well-known Western legend. The 

 oldest hitherto accessible version of it is contained in the writings of 



1 In his book China and the Roman Orient, and in his studies The Mystery of 

 Fu-lin {Journal Am. Or. Soc, Vol. XXX, 1909, pp. 1-31; Vol. XXXIII, 1913, 

 pp. 195-208). 



2 T'oung Pao, 1904, p. 38. 



8 The same mode of writing occurs in Yu yang tsa tsu and in a poem of the T'ang 

 Emperor T'ai-tsung (see P'ei wen yunfu, Ch. 27, p. 25). 



4 The latter has developed the conflicting views of both sides in Toung Pao, 

 1913. P- 798. 



1 Journal asiatique (Mars-Avril, 1914), p. 498. 



