Cotton in ChinaAuthor(s): L. Carrington GoodrichSource: Isis, Vol. 34, No. 5 (Summer, 1943), pp. 408-410Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/225740 .

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COTTON IN CHINA

By L. CARRINGTON GOODRICH

THE evidence of literature and of folklore seems to agree on the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries as the time for the first general use of cotton in China. It would be interesting to know if the evidence of material culture supports this view.

1. Acquaintance with cotton goods is spread over a long period. MAYERS (Notes and Oueries on China and Japan, II, 6, June 1868, 9495), HIRTH (Jo. Roy. As. Soc., No. China Br., 21, Aug. 1886, 230-232 and Chau Ju-kua, 101 n. 12 and 217-220), WATTERS (Essays on the Chinese Language, 439- 440), and LAUFER (Sino-Iranica, 490(492 and 574)-to name just a few Western scholars-have drawn attention to the Chinese literature on the subject. FA-HSIEN fi 5, during his pilgrimage to the sacred places of the BUDDHA (399-414 A.D.), noticed the plant in India, and SHAN HUAI-YUAN

it fi ll (5th century) reported on a cottonlike plant in south-west China. From that time on foreign states commonly included materials made of cotton in their "tribute" to the Chinese court. In 430 Java sent cottons fine and coarse (po-tieh j * and ku-pei t JR ) to China. GUPTA, king of India, sent cotton (chi-pei J ) stuffs at the beginning of the period 502-519. In 523 a mission from Sumatra or Southern Malay arrived at Nan- king bearing cotton goods. In addition to such reports from Chinese works there is the additional evidence of the Tru'o'ng-vinh-ky which tells of the despatch of cotton from Annam to China ca. 679 (cf. CORDIER, Histoire Gene'rale de la Chine, I, 516). LAUFER wrote in 1915 (Jo. of Amer. Folk-Lore, XXVIII, 125): "The Chinese of the sixth century and assuredly of T'ang [618-907] knew the cotton plant and its products." He revised this opinion a little later, however, for in his Sino-Iranica, 492, appear the words: "The real nature of cotton was not yet generally known to the Chinese of the T'ang period." In any event the court continued to receive presents of cotton stuffs from abroad. In 1077 Coromandel sent some, ancd the first group of Jewish families (said to be 73 clans of more than 500 families) to settle at the capital of Northern Sung (960-1126) brought gifts of cotton goods from India (cf. LAUFER, Amer. Jo. of Sem. Lang., Apr. 1930, 188-197). MARCO POLO, who remarks on the cultivation of cotton in various parts of Asia, says nothing of it in his sections on north and central China but writes on Quenlinfu (i.e., Chien-ning-fu, Fukien province) in part as follows: "So much cotton cloth of twisted thread is made there that it is to be had in the whole

province of Mangi."1 It might be added that the earliest illustrations of cotton, its cultivation and manufacture, which I have noted in a Chinese book appear in the well-known ANung-shu ; * ch. 25, by WANG CH'ENE j_ij, published 1313/1314. These and similar pieces of evidence have led LAUFER, HIRTH, GRUMM-GRSHIMAILO and the Chinese scholars CHAO I X X 1727-1814 (in Kai yii ts'ung k'ao R ft X of 1790), and YiY CHENG-HSIEH * JE k, 1775-1840 (in Kuei ssui lei kao M e, m fi of 1833), to the conclusion that cotton cultivation and spinning were not practised on a wide scale until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

An interesting piece of negative evidence occurs in the record of the travels of the highly revered CH'IU CH'U-CHI E|; f i4 (d. 1227), a native of Shantung province, who was summoned by JENGHIZ to visit him in Western Asia. (See trans- lation of WALEY, The Travels of an Alchemist, 86.) The date is the 27th day, 9th moon, 1221, and the place Almaliq, northwest of modern Kulja. The passage reads:

"It is here that they make the stuff called 'tu-4u-ma' [HIRTH and LAUFER equate the first two syllables with San- scrit tuila, meaning cotton] which gave rise to the popular story about a material made from 'sheep's wool planted in the ground.' We now procured seven pieces of it to make into winter clothes. In appearance and texture it is like Chinese willow-down-very fine, soft and clean. Out of it they make thread, ropes, cloth and wadding."

Surely so well-travelled and perspicacious a man as CH'IU would not have bothered to mention this product had he been familiar with it in north China.

2. The best known piece of folklore on the manu- facture of cotton fabrics involves HUANG TAO-P'O

R jt 4, a woman said to have flourished at the end of the thirteenth century. MAYERS (The Chinese Reader's Manual, 1874, #224), together with H. A. GILES who followed him, has given the essence of the story in his notice of the lady,2 but it will do no harm to present it in somewhat greater detail. The legend is first sketched in the Cho keng lu 4X * fc 24/11 of T'AO TSUNG-1

IN 1I (original preface dated 1366), in a poem

by T'Ao's contemporary WANG FENG 3E * who re- M Alarco Polo, Thk Description of the World, translated

and annotated by A. C. MouLE and PAUL PELLIOr, I, 155. This sentence appears in text Z, dating probably from the fifteenth century, which was located by Sir PERCIVAL DAVID at Toledo. Ibid. I, 47-52.

2Not without mistakes: Yai-chou is not on the island of Hainan, nor is anything said of the introduction of cotton from Turkestan.

408

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Cotton in China 409

tired about 1366-67 to live in a thatched cottage which he built close to the site of the shrine erected in honor of HUANG TAO-P'o, and by certain Ming writers. The great encyclopaedia of 1726, the geo- graphical record of the Manchu empire of 1842, and the local records of the prefecture of Sung-chiang (which includes Shanghai) and the district of Shanghai all present one or more vari- ants of the story. (See, for example, the Sung-chiang fu chih I n a ='-- of 1819, reprinted 1884, 18/15b-17a.)

In brief, HUANG TAO-P'o (she is also known by other names), who, according to T'AO, hailed from Yai-chou, Kuangtung province, and according to others was a native of Wu-ni-ching (about 9 miles southwest of the ancient walled town of Shanghai) and was somehow stranded at Yai-chou, picked up in that southern region a superior knowledge of the spinning and weaving of cotton. Now the cotton plant was already known to the people of the lower Yangtze region, but the methods of manufacture into cloth were primitive. They wel- comed the woman HUANG therefore when, in the years 1295-1297, she came (or returned) to Wu-ni-ching and taught them how to fashion im- plements for spinning and weaving. By the time of her death these improvements had spread throughout the district and greatly benefited it. Whereupon a shrine was put up in her memory (one text suggests the year 1337). It was de- stroyed in the fire and pillage at the end of the Yuan dynasty (1367), then rebuilt in the years 1483-1486 by order of the local magistrate. Numerous vicissitudes have befallen the original structure, but a shrine to the lady HUANG was still upright a few years ago. The supplementary record of Shanghai, published 1918, 12/4a reports it standing then in the company of a school and a theater. 3. So far as I am aware the archaeologists of China proper have practically nothing to say on this subject. More light comes from Central Asia. It is possible that among the textiles of approxi- mately the first century (A.D.) found by PETER KOZLOV in the Hsiung-nu grave mounds at Noin-Ula, in Mongolia, there are examples of cotton. Mrs. ALICE PUTNAM BREUER, curator of the Mills College Art Gallery, states it as a fact in a recent publication ("Historical presentation of Chinese textiles," Notes on Far Eastern Studies in America, no. 10, Jan. 1942, p. 22). She writes: "There is [among the KOZLov discoveries] a wealth of Han material, wool, cotton and silk, weaving and embroidery." The Russian writers themselves are much more cautious. In the Izvestia of the State Academy for the History of Material Culture, XI, parts 7-9, 1932 (translation by EUGENIA TOLMACHOFF in the Bulletin of the

Needle and Bobbin Club, XX, nos. 1-2, 1936, p. 6) A. A. VOSKRESENSKY and N. P. TIKHONOV make the following generalization:

'These Mongolian textiles can be easily separated into four groups: woolen fabrics embroidered with Greek de- signs; silk fabrics with woven Chinese designs; fabrics made of vegetable fibre, usually without any design; and finally, fabrics in which various materials and weaves are combined."

Until there is a more precise statement of fact from the Russian scientists it seems wiser to assume that cotton is not assuredly included in the Noin-Ula finds.

A misleading reference to early literature should likewise be noted.

Miss CAMILLA TREVER, in Excavations in North- ern Mongolia (1924-1925), Leningrad, 1932, p. 20, gives two quotations from the Han shu which are supposed to indicate the common use of cotton in China in the first two centuries before our era. In both cases they are mistranslations. Miss TREVER makes no citation of sources, but they are easily recognizable as lifted from the famous chapter on the Hsiung-nu: Han shu 94. ALEX- ANDER WYLIE, who published his translation of this chapter over two generations ago (Jo. of the Anthrop. Inst., III, 401-451 and V, 41-80) renders the two passages (from 94A/13a, 94B/4a) quite accurately. One, which refers to the years 179-157 B.C., is taken from the famous speech of the Chinese eunuch CHUNG-HSING YUEH to the Hsiung-nu shan-yii, and runs as follows:

"Suppose your people were clothed in Chinese silk [j JR], in riding about among the thorns and brushwood, their robes [,?1 and tunics [*] would be unavoidably torn and destroyed ....." (Miss TREVER renders this "silk and cotton clothes.")

The second, which refers to the year 51 B.C., has to do with a munificent gift made by the Chinese court to the Hsiung-nu chieftain; among other objects that gift included

"six thousand pounds of raw silk [u]." (Miss TREVER ren- ders this "6000 ghin of cotton wool.")

F. BERGMAN of the Sven Hedin expedition re- cently reported (Archeological Researches in Sinkiang, 103-4 and 57) finding in the Lop area one mummy of ca. third century A.D. wrapped in some cotton material "probably of Indian origin," and the body of another individual of about ninth century whose garments included some cotton-also "probably of Indian origin." Sir AUREL STEIN at an earlier date gave quite a little data on finds of goods made of cotton in the various sites he explored, from Tunhuang (Kansu province) to regions further west. (See Serindia, III, 1523 and Innermost Asia, II, 1131 sub cotton.) He mentions, inter alia, a Chinese manu- script book cover found at Tunhuang, and there-

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410 L. Carrington Goodrich

fore about tenth century, which may be made of cotton. His most surprising discovery, however, was of a cotton sheet used to cover a coffin at Astana, which bore the following inscription:

"One tuan of yung and tiao cloth from Yao Ch'iin of ... Lan-ch'i hsien [Chekiang province]. On a day in the 8th moon of the 2nd year of Shen-lung [706]." (Translation by LIONEL GILES, Innermost Asia, II, 1044. An illustration of the cloth is on pl. cxxvii.)

CLAPPERTON (Paper, chapter 1) has found no cotton in the Chinese papers of the first millen- nium A.D., and PELLIOT (Revue de l'Orient Chre- tien, 3rd ser., III, 1922-23, 14, n. 1) has remarked

in regard to the famous letter of the Mongol khan GUYUK to INNOCENT IV dated 1246:

"On sait que cette vieille tradition des 'papiers de coton' risque fort d'etre controuvee. J'ai eu dans l'ete de 1922 l'occa- sion de voir le document original; il m'a paru etre ecrit sur un papier analogue a ceux employes un peu plus tard par les Mongols de Perse et que les recherches poursuivies a Vienne ont montre n'etre aucunement a base de coton."

This comment puts in question the former asser- tion that ARHUN'S letter to PHILIPPE LE BEL of 1289 was written on cotton paper. (Cf. SARTON, Introduction, II, 1054.)

Columbia University

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE

ASTRONOMICAL TABLES BEGINNING IN 1361 (Isis, 34, 6, 1942).-En el n093 de Isis, el Prof. L. THORNDIKE habla de un ms. que contiene unas tablas astronomicas, redactadas para un ciclo de 31 afios empezando en el 1361, y para una latitud de 42030'. El autor de dichas Tablas era indu- dablemente judio, pues aparte el incipit: "Dicit Jacob . . .," cita diferentes autores judaicos, entre ellos a LEVI BEN GERS6N. El Prof. THORNDIKE se inclina a suponer el autor uno de los judios su'b- ditos del monarca de Aragon, habitantes en el sur de Francia, por ejemplo un "Mosse Jacob," em- pleado por dicho rey PEDRO IV.

Pero, desde luego, que cabe identificar las tablas astronomicas contenidas en el nuevo ms. de que nos habla el Prof. THORNDIKE. Solo por los datos, no muchos, que nos da en su breve articulo, creemos que se trata de la traduccion latina de las Tablas de YA'QOB B. DAVID B. YOMTOB (BON- JORN), tambien llamado SEN BONIET O PO'EL, las cuales fueron redactadas efectivamente, en el afio 1361, y para un ciclo de 31 anfos, y para la latitud de Perpifian, latitud que coincide con la registrada en aquel ms. Tambien en el prologo a sus tablas R. YA'QOB PO'EL, nos habla de varios autores, entre ellos, de LEVI B. GERSON y del barcelones R. ABRAHAM BAR HIYYA (seguramente el "rabbi Aya Ispalensis" dei ms. citado). De estas tablas hebraicas nos ha llegado una traduccion latina, guaradada en diferentes mss. de los cuales nos habla STEINSCHNEIDER en varias de sus obras (cf. Die hebr. Uebersetzungen des Mittelalters, pag. 615 y Die Mathematik bei den Juden en Bibl. Math. 1898, pag. 39) Y es curioso que el texto latino de estas Tablas fue, a su vez, al parecer, retraducido al hebreo, de un modo resumido.

J. Ma. MILLAS VALLICROSA

Professor MILLAS VALLICROSA'S note reminds me that on September 22, 1942, Professor ALEX-

ANDER MARX, librarian of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, wrote to me as follows:

"Dear Professor Thorndike, I just saw the latest number of Isis in which your note on

the astronomical tables of 1361 naturally interested me very much. The ms. probably contains the tables of Jacob Poel which were composed in Perpignan in 1361. See Stein- schneider, Hebr. Uebersetzungen, p. 615; Bibliotheca Mathe- matica (1898), 39. He records some Latin mss. of these tables.

P.S. RABBI AYA (note 10) is probably R. ABRAHAM BAR HIYYA."

LYNN THORNDIKE

A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY WASHING MACHINE.- The washing machine is essentially a twen- tieth-century domestic boon. When the first really successful working example of the washing machine was invented I do not know, but what must surely be one of the earliest was recorded and figured by ROBERT HOOKE (1635-1703) in his diary. Under date of Saturday, 6 October 1677, he notes:

Sir J. Hockinis waiy of rniillig fine liiiuiwi in it whii

eord bag. fastened nt ono end andi strai(l 1 bya wheel and cylinder dt tlw other. XB. wlerelb She fltRet liinniiei Is waeht wnang auwd anot Htirt

"Sr JOHN HoSKINS way of Rinsing fine linnen in a whip cord bag, fastened at one end and strained by a wheel & cylinder at the other. N.B. whereby the finest linen is washt wrung and not hurt."'

It will be perceived that the principle used in this "washing machine" is much the same as that

1 The Diary of Robert Hooke (edited by HENRY W. ROBIN- sorN and WALTER ADAMS), Taylor & Francis, London, 1935, p. 318.

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