388 Sino-Iranica 



a number of heterogeneous texts. Bretschneider 1 has accepted all this 

 in good faith and without criticism. It is hardly necessary to be a 

 botanist in order to see that the texts of the Nan fan ts'ao mu Zwan 

 and Co ken lu, alleged to refer to the date, bear no relation to this tree. 2 

 The hai tsao M HI described in the former work 3 may very well refer 

 to Cycas revoluta* The text of the other book, which Bretschneider does 

 not quote by its title, and erroneously characterizes as "a writer of the 

 Ming," speaks of six "gold fruit" (kin kwo 4£ ^) trees growing in 

 C'en-tu, capital of Se-6'wan, and, according to an oral tradition, planted 

 at the time of the Han. Then follows a description of the tree, the 

 foreign name of which is given as k'u-lu-ma (see above), and which, 

 according to Bretschneider, suits the date-palm quite well. It is hardly 

 credible, however, that this tree could ever thrive in the climate of 

 Se-c'wan, and Bretschneider himself admits that the fruit of Salisburia 

 adiantifolia now bears also the name kin kwo. Thus, despite the fact 

 that the Persian name for the date is added, the passage of the Co ken 

 lu is open to the suspicion of some misunderstanding. 



Not only did the Chinese know that the date is a product of Persia, 

 but they knew also that it was utilized as food by certain tribes of the 



1 Chinese Recorder, 1871, pp. 265-267. 



2 Bretschneider, it should be understood, was personally acquainted with only 

 the flora of Peking and its environment; for the rest, his familiarity with Chinese 

 plants was mere book-knowledge, and botany as a science was almost foreign to 

 him. Research in the history of cultivated plants was in its very beginning in 

 his days; and his methods relating to such subjects were not very profound, and were 

 rather crude. 



3 Ch. B, p. 4. Also Wu K'i-tsun, author of the Ci wu min H t'u k'ao (Ch. 17, 

 p. 21), has identified the term wu-lou-tse with hai tsao. 



* Stuart, Chinese Materia Medica, p. 140; but Stuart falls into the other ex- 

 treme by identifying with this species also, the terms Po-se tsao, ts'ien nien tsao, 

 etc., which without any doubt relate to the^date. In Bretschneider's translation 

 of the above text there is a curious misunderstanding. We read there, "In the year 

 285 a.d. Lin-yi offered to the Emperor Wu-ti a hundred trees of the hai tsao. The 

 prince Li-sha told the Emperor that in his travels by sea he saw fruits of this tree, 

 which were, without exaggeration, as large as a melon." The text reads, "In the 

 fifth year of the period T'ai-k'an (a.d. 284), Lin-yi presented to the Court a hundred 

 trees. Li Sao-kun d|s /J> ;H* (the well-known magician) said to the Emperor Wu 

 of the Han, ' During my sea- voyages I met Nan-k'i Sen t£; $8 ^ (the magician of 

 the Blest Islands), who ate jujubes of the size of a gourd, which is by no means an 

 exaggeration.' " The two events are not interrelated; the second refers to the second 

 century B.C. Neither, however, has anything to do with the date. The working of 

 Chinese logic is visibly manifest: the sea- travels of Li Sao-kun are combined with 

 his fabulous jujube into the sea-jujube (hai tsao), and this imaginary product is 

 associated with a real tree of that name. Li Si-£en's example shows at what fancies 

 the Chinese finally arrive through their wrong associations of ideas; and Bret- 

 schneider's example finally demonstrates that any Chinese data must first be taken 

 under our microscope before being accepted by science. 



