The Diamond-Point 33 



fiction evolved from the kun-wu diamond-points heard of and imported 

 from the Hellenistic Orient. It has nothing to do with the sword 

 industry of the Huns or Chinese, as speculated by Hirth; nor is it a 

 Damascus blade, as suggested by Faber and Forke. Such books as 

 Lie-tse and many others of like calibre cannot be utilized as historical 

 sources for archaeological argumentation; their stories must first be 

 analyzed, critically dissected, scrutinized, and correlated with other 

 texts, Chinese as well as Western, to receive that stamp of valuation 

 which is properly due them. It is now clear also why Lie-tse links the 

 kun-wu sword with asbestos, inasmuch as the two are products of the 

 Hellenistic Orient. The circumstance that both are credited to King 

 Mu is a meaningless fable. King Mu was the chosen favorite and 

 hero of Taoist legend-makers, to whose name all marvellous objects 

 of distant trade were attached (in the same manner as King Solomon 

 and Alexander in the West). The introduction of the Western Jung 

 on this occasion possibly is emblematic of the intermediary r61e which 

 was played by Turkish tribes in the transmission of goods from the 

 Anterior Orient and Persia to China. 1 



As regards the history of the diamond, we learn that the Chinese, 

 before they became acquainted with the stone as a gem, received the 

 first intimation of it in the shape of diamond-points for mechanical 

 work, sent from the Hellenistic Orient, — known first (at the time 

 of the Han) under the name kun-wu; in the third century (under the 

 Tsin), as will be shown below, under the name kin-kang; and later 

 on, as kin-kang tsuan. It seems that the Chinese made little or no 



Chou dynasty the Western Hu presented a jade-cutting knife of kun-wu, one foot 

 long, capable of cutting jade as though it were merely clayish earth." In this text 

 (quoted in P'ei win yunfu, Ch. 19, p. 13) the word tao is used, and kun-wu is plainly 

 written without the classifiers kin. Here we have the model after which Lie-tse 

 worked. The term kun-wu tao, written in the same style as in Shi chou ki, appears 

 once more in the biography of the painter Li Kung-lin {Sung shi, Ch. 444, p. 7), who 

 died in 1106. The Emperor had obtained a seal of nephrite, which his scholars, 

 despite long deliberations, could not decipher till Li Kung-lin diagnosed it as the 

 famous seal of Ts'in Shi Huang-ti made by Li Se in the third century B.C. (com- 

 pare Chavannes, T*oung Pao, 1904, p. 496). On this occasion the painter said 

 that the substance nephrite is hard, but not quite so hard as a diamond-point 

 (kun-wu tao). 



1 It is interesting that the diamond appears also in the cycle of Si-wang-mu, the 

 legendary motives of which, in my opinion, to a large extent go back to the Hel- 

 lenistic Orient. In the Han Wu-ti nei chuan (p. 2 b; ed. of Shou shan ko ts'ung shu), 

 the goddess appears wearing in her girdle a magic seal of diamond [kin-kang ling si). 

 The work in question, carried by an unfounded tradition into the Han period, is a 

 production of much later times, but seems to have existed in the second half of the 

 sixth century (Pelliot, Bulletin de I'Ecole francaise, Vol. IX, p. 243; and Journal 

 asiatique, 1912, Juillet-Aout, p. 149). 



