Chau Ju-Kua - University of Oregon Libraries

IXTUODUCTION. 39
Such as it is, Chau Ju-kua's work must be regarded as a most valuable
source of information on the ethnology of the nations and tribes known through
the sea-trade carried on by the Chinese and Mohammedan traders in the Far
East about the period at which it was written.
5 His notes to a certain extent are second-hand information, but notwith-
standing this,-he has placed on record much original matter, facts and infor-
mation of igreat interest. The large percentage of clear and shnple matter-of-
fact data we find in his work, as compared with the improbable and incredible
admixtures which we are accustomed to encounter in all oriental authors of
10 his time, gives him a prominent place among the mediaeval authors on the
ethnography of his time, a period particularly interesting to us, as it preceeds
by about a century Marco Polo, and fills a gap in our knowledge ofChina's
relations with the outside world extending from the Arab writers of the ninth
and tenth centuries to the days of the great Venetian traveller.
15 in hisPeuples orientaux connus des anciens Chinois, 48—49 (23 edit., 1886). F. Hirth translated
the entire work; during the years 1885 to 1895, and during his stay at Chungking (1893—95)
revised his translation with Mr. H. E. Fraser, then British Consul at that port. He published
the chapter on Ta-ts'in in his China and the Roman Orient (18851 92—96, and other portions of
it in his Die Lander des Islam (T'oung-pao, V, 1894), Das Reich Malabar (Ibid. VI, 1895), Chi-
20 nesiche Studien, 29—43, Die Insel Hainan nach Chao Ju-kua (Bastian Festschrift, 1896), Aus
der Ethnographie des Tschau Ju-kua (Sitzungsberichte der philos.-philol. und histor. Classe der
K. Bayer. Akad. d. Wissensch. 1898, III) and in Journal Royal Asiatic Society, 1896, 57—82,
477—57. More recently P. Pelliot has made use of this work in Bull, de I'Ecole Franj.
d'Extreme Orient, IV, as has also G. Schlegelina series of articles in the T'oung-pao, referred
25 to in subsequent notes to our text. So far as I am aware Chou K"ti-fei's Ling-wai-tai-ta was
first made known to Western students in 1899 by Tsuboi Kumazo in his paper entitled Cheu
Ch'ilfe's Aufzeichnungen ilber die Freniden LSnder, published in the Actes du XIP Congres
des Orientalistes a Rome, 1901, I, CXL. Since then Pelliot has made some use of it in
his study mentioned above.