July, 1913. Notes on Turquois. 33 



The Wei Ho, further, refers to two stories taken from the Ming- 

 huang Is a hi} 



Emperor Ming-huang is said to have erected in the palace Hua-ts'ing 

 a bathing establishment consisting of ten rooms where he had a boat 

 biiilt of silver and steel, varnished, and adorned with pearls and jade; 

 moreover, he piled up se-Se in the bathing pool. The author of the 

 Wei Ho thinks that the use of the word lei (No. 6833) "to pile up" in 

 this connection indicates that the se-se in question were beads, and not 

 stones. But this supposition is hardly correct, for it leaves entirely 

 unexplained what these beads (or 'pearls) had to do in the bath. In 

 the actual text of the Ming-huang tsa lu ^ the story, however, is related 

 in the form that the se-se were utilized to build up the well-known 

 Three Isles of the Blessed of mythological fame, and this account 

 sounds more plausible. In this case, se-se seems tp have been a kind of 

 building stone. ^ The other story in the Ming-huang tsa lu relates to 

 Dame Kuo-kuo, a sister of the celebrated beauty and imperial concubine 

 Yang Kuei-fei,* who btdlt a house and rewarded the workmen with two 

 gold cups and three pecks of se-se; one peck of these, according to the 

 opinion expressed by the author of the Wei Ho, had the value of a pearl. 

 He further tells after the Wu lei siang kan chi, a work of the poet Su Shi 

 (1036-1101), that Emperor I-tsung (860-873) of the T'ang dynasty 

 presented a princess with a screen of se-se adorned with genuine pearls 

 strung on blue and green silk, whence our authot Kao Se-sun infers 

 that in this case se-se was a kind of pearls of brilliant quality. This 

 discourse leads us to think that the Sung writers did not know any 

 longer what the se-se of the T'ang dynasty were, that the se-se peculiar 

 to that age were entirely lost in the Sung period, that substitutes were 

 then in vogue, merely designated by that name and ascribed to two 

 localities, Shan-chou and P'ing-lu, and that even the belief prevailed 

 that the se-se passed off under this name at that time were artificial 

 productions due to some smelting process.^ 



'That is, Miscellaneous Records regarding Emperor Ming-huang (712-754), a 

 fwork by Chfing Ch'u-hui of the T'ang period. 



- Printed in the collection Shou shan ko ts'ung shu, Vol. 84, Ch. B, p. 4. 



^ This seems to be the case also in a poem of Po Kii-i (772-846) when he speaks of 

 ^'apiece (or slab) of s^-se stone" (i p'ien si-se shi; P'ei win yiinfu, Ch. 100 A, p. 47). 

 'Neither the addition "stone" nor the word p'ien would be used here, if the domestic 

 ti-si had been a precious stone or gem. 



* Giles, Biographical Dictionary, p. 908. 



* Under the Yuan dynasty the se-sS are mentioned by Ch'ang TS, a Chinese 

 envoy who visited Bagdad in 1259, as precious stones in the palace of the Caliph, 

 together with pearls, lapis lazuli and diamonds (Bretschneider, Chinese Recorder, 

 Vol. V, p. 5). Bretschneider does not make in this passage an attempt at identifying 

 the stone. When he says that, according to K'ang-hi's Dictionary, it is a kind of 

 pearl, it should be remembered that the Chinese word chu means only a bead, regard- 



