Areca/Betel and Cloves in a Twelfth-Century Chinese Treatise
I recently picked up a copy of James Hargett’s 2010 translation of Treatises of the Supervisor and Guardian of the Cinnamon Sea (桂海虞衡志), a description of Guangxi in southern China (and Guilin in particular — Figure 1) written in the late twelfth century by Fàn Chéngdà (范成大), a high-ranking government official. It’s a fascinating work. Hargett’s translation is excellent and packed full of footnotes, and the introduction deftly places it within the context of both Song-era Guangxi and the broader pre-modern Chinese tradition of ethnography.
A number of different Indonesian commodities are referred to in the text, notably cockatoos (which I will discuss another time). In this short post I’m going to take a look at Fan’s description of areca nuts and betel chewing.
Areca nuts are the fruits of a tall thin palm tree (Areca catechu) common in South and Southeast Asia and the western Pacific (Figure 2). They are used as narcotics — they have a mild stimulating effect — throughout this area, usually chewed as part of a quid flavoured with spices and wrapped in the leaf of the betel vine (Piper betle — Indonesian: sirih). The persistent association with betel leaves has meant that the areca fruits are themselves often referred to as ‘betel nuts’ in colloquial English (and in Hargett’s translation of Fan’s text, which I have adapted below), and the practice as a whole is usually referred to as ‘betel chewing’. Lime (calcium carbonate) is a common addition to the quid — Fan mentions this — but any number of other ingredients were/are added in India and island Southeast Asia, including camphor and clove. Discerning chewers appear to have distinguished between different types of nut and quid, as you’ll see in Fan’s account.
The modern Chinese word for ‘areca nut’ is 檳榔 (pinyin: bīnláng, Middle Chinese: pjin-lang — Kroll 2017:24 sub 檳). This is the term Fan uses as well. Its origins aren’t entirely clear, but it is usually considered to have some relationship with the Malay word pinang ‘areca nut’, and could well be a Malay loan into Chinese — see the entry in the Austronesian Comparative Dictionary for more. As with some other important cultivated plants (bananas, taro, sugarcane), Areca catechu was probably domesticated, or at least first cultivated, on the island of New Guinea, where archaeological evidence suggests its fruits have been chewed since long before the arrival of speakers of Austronesian languages in the mid Holocene (Kirch 1997:39–40). The palm has a number of wild relatives in New Guinea, including A. jobiensis and A. macrocalyx, and their nuts are also chewed by people on the island (May 1984:143).
Betel chewing was of considerable cultural importance in western Indo-Malaysia before the Columbian Exchange. Cigarettes have gradually taken over, especially in Indonesia (where tobacco is one of the biggest killers), but betel chewing is still included as part of some important ceremonies — particularly weddings. In eastern Indonesia, however, betel is still vitally important, and if you spend even a short time there you’ll see people walking around with what look like blood-filled cheeks. It’s also very common in Taiwan and is chewed at festivities in India (where it usually goes by the name of paan). It stains your teeth red and eventually, given enough chewing, black. I’ve chewed it a couple of times but I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the drug for me.
In any case, the Chinese text below is taken from Hargett (2010:250) and the translation is adapted from that on pages 127–128 of the same work.
TEXT
附條:檳榔。 生黎峒。上春取為軟檳榔，夏秋採幹為米檳榔， 小而尖為雞心檳榔。扁者為大腹子。悉能下氣，鹽漬為鹽檳榔。瓊管取其征，居歲計之半， 廣州亦數萬緡。自閩至廣，以蜆灰蔞葉嚼之，先吐赤水如血，而後嚥其餘汁。廣州加丁香，桂花， 三賴子，為香藥檳榔。
TRANSLATION
‘Supplementary entry: ARECA NUTS [binlang] grow in the settlements of the Li people [on Hainan]. (1) Those gathered at the time of Ascendant Spring [Shangchun] (2) are made into ‘soft areca nuts’. Those gathered in summer and fall and dried are made into ‘rice areca nuts’. The smaller and pointy ones are made into ‘chicken-heart areca nuts’. Oblate ones are made into ‘big bellies’. (3) All of these can give off an [identifiable] odor. Those preserved in a salty solution are made into ‘salty areca nuts’. The Qiong County Administration collects taxes on areca nuts, which accounts for half its annual budget. Guang County also collects several tens of thousands strings of cash in taxes. From Min to Guang (4) areca nuts are chewed with lime powder and betel vine leaves (5). Only after one spits out the fiery red liquid, which resembles blood, can one swallow the remaining juice. (6) In Guang County they add cloves (7), sweet osmanthus (8), and galangal (9) to make aromatic-medicinal betel nuts.’
NOTES
(1) Li people live in Hainan and speak a Kra-Dai or Daic language (related to Thai).
(2) ‘That is, the first lunar month.’ (H.)
(3) Some of these varieties were apparently imported from the Philippines rather than Hainan. It is interesting to compare some of the names with the types of betel quids enumerated in Bujangga Manik (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Jav. b.3. (R)), a fifteenth-century narrative poem in Old Sundanese — particularly kadal meteng ‘pregnant lizard’ areca (possibly similar to Fan’s ‘big bellies’) and pinang gading ‘ivory areca’ (perhaps similar to Fan’s ‘[uncooked] rice areca nuts’, assuming the names are both based on the colour of the quids).
(4) = ‘From Fujian to Guangxi’.
(5) This is the betel vine (Piper betle —蔞葉 pinyin: lóuyè) used to wrap areca nuts to make quids for chewing.
(6) Fan’s not kidding: This juice really does resemble blood.
(7) The word here is the standard one for ‘cloves’ — 丁香 (dīngxiāng), which literally means ‘nail fragrance’. As I’ve mentioned more than once on this blog, the equation of cloves and (iron) nails was common in Europe as well, in large part because cloves do look like little nails. The English word ‘clove’, for instance, comes from the French clou, ultimately from Latin clavus ‘nail’ (cf. Portuguese cravo, etc.). All the cloves in the medieval world came from Maluku in eastern Indonesia.
(8) Lit. ‘cinnamon flowers’. This is actually the name of a plant from southern China, Osmanthus fragrans, rather than the blossom of cinnamon trees.
(9) I disagree with the editor here and use the word ‘galangal’ in place of Hargett’s ‘ginger’. Hargett himself identities 三賴子 with Alpinia galanga, the English common name of which is in fact ‘galangal’ (Indonesian: lengkuas). It’s true that A. galanga is in the ginger family (Zingiberaceae) but that does not make it equivalent to true ginger (Zingiber officinale).
REFERENCES
Hargett, James M (ed). 2010. Treatise of the supervisor and guardian of the cinnamon sea. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Kirch, P. V. 1997. The Lapita peoples. Ancestors of the Oceanic world. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Kroll, Paul W. 2017. A student’s dictionary of Classical and medieval Chinese. Leiden: Brill.
May, R. J. 1984. Kaikai Aniani. A guide to bush foods, markets, and culinary arts of Papua New Guinea. Bathurst: Robert Brown & Associates.
A. J. West — Leiden, December 2019
