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11,22-23 ' SAPAN-WOOD. — COTTON. 217
22.
SAPAN-WOOD m ^)'
Su-mu comes from the country of Chon-la. The tree resembles the pine
and juniper. The leaves are like those of the tung-tsHng tree (^ pj). Its
6 habitat is in the uncultivated parts of the hilly country, where the people
are allowed to cut it. "When the bark is removed and the wood dried in the
sun, it is of a deep red colour and may be used in dying purple. It is popu-
larly known as wa-mu (^ TJiC).
Note.
10 The wood of the Caesalpinia sappan. It was known to the Arabs as bakkam, and as
Brazil-wood in Western mediaeval commerce. Its name in Malay is supang, which is the original
of the Chinese su-mu, or rather of the earlier form su-fang, concerning which Nan-fang ts'au-muchuang,
2,4, says: «T)ie su-fang (|^ i^) belongs to the huai {J^ sophora) variety. The
flowers have black seeds. The tree grows in Chan-ch'Sng (Annam). The men of the south (of
15 China) make a deep red dye by steeping it in Ta-yu (^ J^) water, which (has the property of)
making the colour particularly deep.» The word su-fang is said by some Chinese writers to be the
name of an island. Pon-ts'au, 352,35''. Conf. Yule, Marco Polo, II, 869, where sappan is derived
from Japan, an impossible derivation, as the name J'i-pon (Japan) was first used in A. D. 670.
In connexion with dye stuffs, it is interesting to note that already in the sixth century, or
20 very early in the seventh, the true indigo or Indigofera tinctoria, L. was known to the Chinese
as a product of the Persian (Sassanian) province of Ts'au (:J^); it was called in Chinese ts'ing-tai
(W ^).
Sui-shu, 83. Sect. Ts'au. See Bretschneider, J. C. B. K. A. S., XXV, 214.
The term tung-tsing here used is a descriptive and comprehensive one («winter-green»)
applied to certain evergreen oleaceous trees which harbour the wax-insect. Porter Smith,
25 Materia medica, 229, Hanbury, Science papers, 67.It is the Ligustrum lucidum, Bretschneider,
Bot. Sinic. Ill, 513—517. Wa-mu may be an abbreviation for Wa-li-mii or «wood of "Wa-li».
Wa-li is mentioned by our author (supra, p. 54) as a dependency of Chon-Ia.
23.
COTTON (^ M)-
30 «The U-pei tree resembles a small mulberry-tree, with a hibiscus-like
(^ M)
^0^'®^ furnishing a floss half an inch and more in length, very
much like goose-down, and containing some dozens of seeds. In the south the
people remove the seed from the floss by means of iron chopsticks, upon
which the floss is taken in the hand and spun without troubling about
85 twisting together the thread. Of the cloth (^) woven therefrom there are
several qualities)), the most durable and the strongest is called tou-lo-mien