BCEHMERIA 



NIVEA 



Hhea 



CHINA-GRASS AND RAMIE 



China- 

 grass or 

 Rhea. 



Not mentioned 

 in Indian 



Classics. 



Ramie. 



Uniformity of 

 Stock. 



Europe, while the other the Malaya plant can only be raised under 

 glass, so far as Europe is concerned. The distinction ought therefore to 

 prove of considerable value to Indian prospective cultivators. In fact 

 it seems possible that some share of past failures may be due to Indian 

 experimentalists having forced the cultivation of the tropical plant in 

 temperate areas. That being so, it may be useful to set forth the two 

 forms separately, but the reader should consult The Agricultural Ledger 

 (above mentioned) for the botanical synonyms of the plants in question : 



ft Var. nivea proper; Watt, I.e. 8, t. 1. The China-grass or Rhea of com- 

 merce bears the following local and vernacular names : chu-ma in China ; 

 cay-gai, pa-ma in Cochin-China ; kankura (rarely Icund or kurkund), in Bengal ; 

 reeha (riha) or risa in Assam ; pan in the Shan States, and gun, gwon in Burma 

 (ma, see Cannabis, p. 251). 



It will be seen by a comparison with the Malayan names recorded as more 

 especially applicable to the second variety below, that very possibly the only 

 truly indigenous Indian names in the above enumeration are kankura and riha. 

 Further, the latter name is perhaps only a modern translation from one plant 

 to another of the word risa, the Naga name for a fibre-yielding plant which 

 has recently come to be spoken of as the ban-riha or wild-riha of Assam 

 (see Villebrunea, p. 164). In part support of this idea it may be added that 

 the people who use the ban-riha fibre grow the true riha plant, but only as 

 an article of export they never use that fibre themselves, so that it seems 

 fair to suppose that the plant which they use is their own riha or risa. In 

 none of the classic books of India is there the slightest mention of kankura or 

 riha. In fact there are no references to any fibre that could for a moment be 

 supposed to be rhea. There is a curious passage, however, in the account 

 of the Voyage to the East Indies, written by Linschoten (1598, i., 96), which de- 

 scribes a fibre under the name of " Hearbe Bengalen," that might be (and has 

 been) supposed to be rhea, though it was more probably Catotruiii* ait/antea 

 floss, perhaps the grass-cloth fibre of the early English writers (see pp. 207-8). 

 Turning now to China, Marco Polo, speaking of Kweichan, mentions the bark 

 fibre from which " they manufacture very fine summer clothing." Many subse- 

 quent writers allude to the hiapu or sia-pu or the summer cloths of Kweichan, 

 which being to-day made of China-grass, it is assumed were so made in Marco 

 Polo's time ; and there is probably little doubt that they were. One of the earliest 

 European travellers to describe the China-grass (of China) was Cunningham, who 

 in the beginning of the 18th century sent Chinese plants to his English friends 

 Sloan, Petiver and Plukenet. Among these was the textile plant ma, which he 

 called Urtica racemifera maxima Sinarum (Pluk. Amalth., 212, t. 49, ,f. 2), a 

 plant which Linnaeus identified (Sp. PL, 1764, 1398) with his I'rtien nivea. 



p Var. tenacissima (sp. fioxb.); Watt, I.e. 20, t. 2. This is the true rami 

 or ramie, which by some writers has been incorrectly called rhea while 

 they have assigned China-grass as distinctive of the variety * <. The first 

 record of its introduction into India brought the Sumatran name calue (kalue) 

 caloce or caluse to that country ; throughout the Malay it is rami, rame, ramien 

 or gunn ; inan in Bonoa ; gambe in Celebes ; moumineram in Java ; kiparoy, 

 kapieriet, haramay, lalakie, in Sunda ; kloei in Sokojan, etc., etc. Prain (Sketch of 

 Life of Francis Hamilton (once Buchanan), 1905, 24) gives a letter of Hamilton's 

 dated 1814, in which he refuses to believe that the caloce differs from B. niv?u 

 and further that he considered it groundless to expect the fibre to turn out of 

 general use. Roxburgh (Trans. Soc. Arts, 1806, xxiv., 148) tells us that in 

 1804 the plan* grown in the Botanic Gardens, Calcutta, from Malay seed had 

 flowered and that he had sent a drawing of the same to the Court of Directors. 



Races of Plant Grown. During repeated investigations, through the 

 Indian rhea districts, a large percentage of the known plots of cultivation 

 in Bengal, Assam and Kangra were systematically visited. With prac- 

 tically only one exception the stock was that indicated above as var. 

 nivea, and the one exception that of a tea-planter's vegetable garden in 

 Assam, where a few recently imported roots of var. tenacissima were 

 found. In several instances, however, plants which might be regarded 

 as local developments, if not crosses between the two varieties, were 



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