354 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1900. 



mentions the fact that " a Mohammedan held the position of judge over 

 those of his relii^ion, l)ythe authority of the Emperor of China, who is 

 j udge of all the Mohauuncdans who resort to those parts. Upon festival 

 days he performs the pu])li(' service with the Mohammedans, and pro- 

 nounces the sermon or kotbat, which he concludes in the usual form, 

 with prayers for the Sultan of Moslems. The merchants of Irak — that 

 is, Persia — who trade thither are no way dissatisfied with his conduct 

 or administration in this port, because his decisions are just and equitable 

 and conformable to the Koran. " And the commentator on these travels, 

 Abu Said Al Hasan, who probablj^ wrote earlier in the tenth century, 

 when speaking of the interruption then recently caused in "the ordi- 

 nary navigation from Siraf to China," says this to have been occa- 

 sioned by the revolt of "an officer who was considerable for his 

 employment, though not of royal family," named Baichu. He laid 

 siege to Canfu in the j^ear of the Hegira 264 (A. D. 885). "At last he 

 became master of the city, and put all the inhabitants to the sword. 

 There are persons fully acquainted with the affairs of China, who assure 

 us that, besides the Chinese who were massacred on this occasion, there 

 perished 120,000 Mohammedans, Jews, Christians, and Parsees, who 

 were there on account of traffic. The number of the professors of 

 these four religions who thus perished is exactly known, because the 

 Chinese are exceedingly nice in the accounts they keep of them." ^ 



Apart, however, from the sea route, porcelain might possibly have 

 followed the course of the overland traffic through central Asia, the 

 use of which can be traced back to a very remote antiquity, some au- 

 thorities claiming that there are indications of communication by this 

 route between China and the West so early as 2698 B. C. , and that in 

 2353 B. C. an embassy arrived in China from a country which is sup- 

 posed to have been Chaldea.*^ There is, therefore, nothing impossible 

 in the claim put forward that a small ivory-white plate having uncut 

 emeralds and rubies, set in gold filigree, let into paste, and the Chinese 

 wordy^« (happiness) marked on the foot in the seal character under the 

 glaze, now in the royal collection at Dresden, was brought into Europe 

 by a crusader of the twelfth century; provided, of course, the paste, 

 glaze, etc., correspond with those which characterize the porcelain 

 manufactured in China about that date or prior to it. 



KIND OF PORCELAIN CARRIED WESTWARD. 



What then was the porcelain that participated in this early trade? 

 Chao Ju-kua, in the single instance, in which he alludes to its color, 

 states it to have been " white and chHng^ or celadon. " It would almost 

 necessarily have consisted of strong, coarse ware, in order to resist the 



1 Harris's Collection of Voyages (764), I, pp. 523 and 530. 



■■'Sir Charles Wilson's Address before the Geographical Section of the British Asso- 

 ciation, Bath, 1888. 



