Irano-Sinica— Paper Money 561 



he is assuredly wrong in the assertion that paper is not made in China 

 from mulberry-trees. This fact he could have easily ascertained from 

 S. Julien, 1 who alludes to mulberry-tree paper twice, first, as "papier 

 de racines et d'6corce de murier;" and, second, in speaking of the bark 

 paper from Broussonetia — "On emploie aussi pour le meme usage 

 T^corce d' Hibiscus Rosa sinensis et de murier; ce dernier papier sert 

 encore a recueillir les graines de vers a soie." What is understood by 

 the latter process may be seen from plate 1 in Julien's earlier work on 

 sericulture, 2 where the paper from the bark of the mulberry-tree is like- 

 wise mentioned. 



The Ci p'u %& Hf, a treatise on paper, written by Su Yi-kien W% m 

 toward the close of the tenth century, enumerates, among the various 

 sorts of paper manufactured during his lifetime, paper from the bark 

 of the mulberry-tree (saw pH ^ &) made b Y tne people of the north. 8 ^ 

 Chinese paper money of mulberry-bark was known in the Islamic I 

 world in the beginning of the fourteenth century; that is, during the 

 Mongol period. Accordingly it must have been manufactured in China^j 

 during the Yuan dynasty. Ahmed Sibab Eddin, who died in Cairo 

 in 1338 at the age of ninety-three, and left an important geographical 

 work in thirty volumes, containing interesting information on China 

 gathered from the lips of eye-witnesses, makes the following comment 

 on paper money, in the translation of Ch. Schefer: 4 "On emploie 

 dans le Khita, en guise de monnaie, des morceaux d'un papier de forme 

 allongee fabrique' avec des filaments de muriers sur lequel est imprime' 

 le nom de l'empereur. Lorsqu'un de ces papiers est us£, on le porte 

 aux officiers du prince et, moyennant une perte rninime, on recoit un 

 autre billet en echange, ainsi que cela a lieu dans nos hotels des mon- 

 naies, pour les matieres d'or et d'argent que Ton y porte pour 6tre 

 converties en pieces monnay£es." 



And in another passage: "La monnaie des Chinois est faite de 

 billets fabriqu^s avec l'dcorce du murier. II y en a de grands et de 



1 Industries anciennes et modernes de l'empire chinois, pp. 145, 149 (Paris 

 1869). 



2 Risum6 des principaux traites chinois sur la culture des muriers et l'^ducation 

 des vers a soie, p. 98 (Paris, 1837). According to the notions of the Chinese, Julien 

 remarks, everything made from hemp, like cord and weavings, is banished from the 

 establishments where silkworms are reared, and our European paper would be 

 very harmful to the latter. There seems to be a sympathetic relation between the 

 silkworm feeding on the leaves of the mulberry and the mulberry paper on which 

 the cocoons of the females are placed. 



3 Ko ci kin yuan, Ch. 37, p. 6. 



* Relations des Musulmans avec les Chinois (Centenaire de l'Ecole des langues 

 orientales vivantes, Paris, 1895, p. 17). 



