14 COTTON 



CHINESE AND INDIAN CULTURE OF COTTON 



Herodotus tells us that "the thorax or cuirass 

 sent by Amasis, King of Egypt, to Sparta" in 550 

 B. C., was "adorned with gold and the fleeces from 

 trees" and he goes on to explain that in India are 

 trees "the fruit of which is a wool exceeding in 

 beauty and goodness that of a sheep." A crude sys- 

 tem of hand-spinning, weaving and dyeing was 

 early worked out by the Hindoos more than two 

 thousand years ago and singularly enough, in all 

 of the centuries that followed this, intelligent peo- 

 ple added practically no improvement to the cotton 

 machinery the elders then planned. What Herod- 

 otus reported as to equipment was practically the 

 same as that which Marco Polo found, and there 

 was no change from the time of Marco Polo to that 

 of Arkwright. 



Across the Himalayan "Palace of the Snow," 

 from the Hindoos is China ; and it was not a great 

 while after India began to use cotton before the 

 Chinese put it into their gardens and sang of it in 

 their poems evidently treating it, however, as a 

 rare and beautiful, rather than as a useful, plant ; so 

 that even in the sixth century after Christ it was a 

 matter of marvel and record with the scribes of that 

 day that the Emperor Outi had a rare robe made of 

 cotton; and it was five hundred years later in the 

 days of Kubla Khan before the manufacture of 

 cotton among the Celestials became at all extensive. 

 Since that time, however, cotton has been largely 

 used for clothing the "heathen Chinee," and he has 

 not only used his own product for this purpose, but 

 has imported liberally from India and the Burmese 

 provinces, 



