The Travels Of Marco Polo - Volume 2 Of 2 By Marco Polo And Rustichello Of Pisa











































 -  Pakwiha, between Amoy and Chang-chau, is mentioned in the
Chinese Commercial Guide (p. 114) as now the place where - Page 124
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Pakwiha, Between Amoy And Chang-Chau, Is Mentioned In The Chinese Commercial Guide (P. 114) As Now The Place Where

The coarse blue ware, so largely exported to India, etc., is largely manufactured; and Phillips mentions Tung-'an (about half-

Way between T'swan-chau and Chang-chau) as a great seat of this manufacture.

Looking, however, to the Ramusian interpolations, which do not indicate a locality necessarily near Zayton, or even in Fo-kien, it is possible that Murray is right in supposing the place intended in these to be really King-te chen in Kiang-si, the great seat of the manufacture of genuine porcelain, or rather its chief mart JAU-CHAU FU on the P'o-yang Lake.

The geographical indication of this city of porcelain, as at the place where a branch of the River of Kinsay flows off towards Zayton, points to a notion prevalent in the Middle Ages as to the interdivergence of rivers in general, and especially of Chinese rivers. This notion will be found well embodied in the Catalan Map, and something like it in the maps of the Chinese themselves;[5] it is a ruling idea with Ibn Batuta, who, as we have seen (in note 2), speaks of the River of Zayton as connected in the interior with "the Great River," and who travels by this waterway accordingly from Zayton to Kinsay, taking no notice of the mountains of Fo-kien. So also (supra, p. 175) Rashiduddin had been led to suppose that the Great Canal extended to Zayton. With apparently the same idea of one Great River of China with many ramifications, Abulfeda places most of the great cities of China upon "The River." The "Great River of China," with its branches to Kinsay, is alluded to in a like spirit by Wassaf (supra, p. 213). Polo has already indicated the same idea (p. 219).

Assuming this as the notion involved in the passage from Ramusio, the position of Jau-chau might be fairly described as that of Tingui is therein, standing as it does on the P'o-yang Lake, from which there is such a ramification of internal navigation, e.g. to Kinsay or Hang-chau fu directly by Kwansin, the Chang-shan portage already referred to (supra, p. 222), and the Ts'ien T'ang (and this is the Kinsay River line to which I imagine Polo here to refer), or circuitously by the Yang-tzu and Great Canal; to Canton by the portage of the Meiling Pass; and to the cities of Fo-kien either by the Kwansin River or by Kian-chan fu, further south, with a portage in each case across the Fo-kien mountains. None of our maps give any idea of the extent of internal navigation in China. (See Klaproth, Mem. vol. iii.)

The story of the life-long period during which the porcelain clay was exposed to temper long held its ground, and probably was only dispelled by the publication of the details of the King-te chen manufacture by Pere d'Entrecolles in the Lettres Edifiantes.

NOTE 6. - The meagre statement in the French texts shows merely that Polo had heard of the Fo-kien dialect. The addition from Ramusio shows further that he was aware of the unity of the written character throughout China, but gives no indication of knowledge of its peculiar principles, nor of the extent of difference in the spoken dialects. Even different districts of Fo-kien, according to Martini, use dialects so different that they understand each other with difficulty (108).

[Mendoza already said: "It is an admirable thing to consider how that in that kingdome they doo speake manie languages, the one differing from the other: yet generallie in writing they doo understand one the other, and in speaking not." (Parke's Transl. p. 93.)]

Professor Kidd, speaking of his instructors in the Mandarin and Fo-kien dialects respectively, says: "The teachers in both cases read the same books, composed in the same style, and attached precisely the same ideas to the written symbols, but could not understand each other in conversation." Moreover, besides these sounds attaching to the Chinese characters when read in the dialect of Fo-kien, thus discrepant from the sounds used in reading the same characters in the Mandarin dialect, yet another class of sounds is used to express the same ideas in the Fo-kien dialect when it is used colloquially and without reference to written symbols! (Kidd's China, etc., pp. 21-23.)

The term Fokien dialect in the preceding passage is ambiguous, as will be seen from the following remarks, which have been derived from the Preface and Appendices to the Rev. Dr. Douglas's Dictionary of the Spoken Language of Amoy,[6] and which throw a distinct light on the subject of this note: -

"The vernacular or spoken language of Amoy is not a mere colloquial dialect or patois, it is a distinct language - one of the many and widely differing spoken languages which divide among them the soil of China. For these spoken languages are not dialects of one language, but cognate languages, bearing to each other a relation similar to that between Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, or between English, Dutch, German, and Danish. The so-called 'written language' is indeed uniform throughout the whole country, but that is rather a notation than a language. And this written language, as read aloud from books, is not spoken in any place whatever, under any form of pronunciation. The most learned men never employ it as a means of ordinary oral communication even among themselves. It is, in fact, a dead language, related to the various spoken languages of China, somewhat as Latin is to the languages of Southern Europe.

"Again: Dialects, properly speaking, of the Amoy vernacular language are found (e.g.) in the neighbouring districts of Changchew, Chinchew, and Tungan, and the language with its subordinate dialects is believed to be spoken by 8 or 10 millions of people. Of the other languages of China the most nearly related to the Amoy is the vernacular of Chau-chau-fu, often called 'the Swatow dialect,' from the only treaty-port in that region.

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