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. 
