Two Early Descriptions of Camphor Production
Camphor has come up several times on this blog. If you’ve read everything on the blog so far then you may be sick of it. This is yet another post about the stuff — specifically about the two earliest accounts of Southeast Asian camphor production, which happen to come from different corners of the planet but nonetheless show remarkable similarities. Here I’ll go over a few basic facts about camphor to jog your memories before having a look at the relevant texts, one in Chinese and the other in Arabic.
Camphor is a white oily crystalline substance produced by several plant species, most notably tall forest trees in the genus Dryobalanops, several species of which have been exploited for camphor production in Sumatra, Borneo, and the Malay Peninsula. (Another tree species, Cinnamomum camphora, native to Taiwan, southern China, and Japan, has also been exploited for camphor production in more recent times.) The camphor is stored inside the wood, and to get at it entire trees, which tend to live lonely lives deep in the forest, are cut down. Camphor could never be produced in large quantities as a result. The substance was put to many uses in the Middle Ages (Fig. 1): It could be added to food and drink; it was used in medicines to treat a range of conditions, from headaches to nosebleeds and swellings; and it even found its way into recipes for gunpowder and fireworks, particularly in late-medieval Europe.
Camphor was a truly hemispheric phenomenon in the Middle Ages — one of many things, like cloves and rosewater and the Arabic script, that would have been recognisable to sophisticated people living anywhere from Morocco to Japan and beyond. The Malay word kapur (originally ‘chalk’ but by extension also ‘camphor’) was the source of terms for camphor across medieval Afro-Eurasia, including the modern English word. Barus on the northwest coast of Sumatra, known in Arabic and Persian as Fanṣur, was particularly well-known for its camphor, and the local term kapur Barus (lit. ‘Barus chalk’), attested in many texts in Malay, Old Sundanese, and Old Javanese, was loaned into or calqued by languages as far apart as Old French and Chinese. It is reasonable to infer that the camphora referred to in medieval European texts came largely from Sumatra and Borneo, as did the kāfūra in medieval Arabic ones.
In this post we’re going to look at two of the earliest sources describing the processing of Southeast Asian Dryobalanops camphor — one written by a Persian geographer in Arabic and the other by a Táng-dynasty Chinese writer. Both texts were written in the late ninth century and, significantly, appear to draw on the same original account, perhaps a text or a verbal description in Persian. (There were significant connections between China and the Persian-speaking world at this time, and Persians in China were renowned for their medical knowledge — see e.g. Allsen 2004:11–14.) The similarities between these accounts have been noted in the past (see Donkin 1999:54) and are perhaps unsurprising. That Chinese and Persian writers drew on similar sources when attempting to describe Southeast Asia in the ninth century is nonetheless an excellent demonstration of the interconnected nature of Afro-Eurasia in the Middle Ages.
These two texts, introduced and translated below, are not the earliest extant references to camphor — as we’ve seen on this blog, camphor is mentioned in the Qur’ān and also perhaps in some early Sogdian texts — but they are the earliest surviving descriptions of the substance’s origins and processing.
Duàn Chéngshì (段成式)
Southeast Asian Dryobalanops camphor trees were probably first described by Táng-dynasty author Duàn Chéngshì (段成式, d.863) in chapter 18 of his Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang (酉陽雜俎). Duàn’s work does what it says on the tin — the topics covered are nothing if not eclectic — and the work is not principally botanical or medical. The description of camphor trees is brief:
TEXT
‘龍腦香樹，出婆利國 […] 樹高八九丈，大可六七圍，葉圓而背白，無花實。其樹有肥有瘦，瘦者有婆律膏香，一曰瘦者出龍腦香，肥者出婆律膏也。在木心中，斷其樹劈取之。膏於樹端流出，斫樹作坎而承之’
TRANSLATION
‘The dragon’s brain perfume [i.e. camphor] tree comes from Borneo. (1) […] The tree is eight or nine zhàng [25–30m] tall and the girth can be six or seven handspans. The leaves are round with white backs. There are no flowers or fruit. There are fat and thin trees; the thin ones have Barus fragrance, [though] some say the thin ones have dragon’s brain while the fat ones have Barus fragrance. (2) [The substance] is inside the wood; cut down the tree and [you can] take it. Oil [i.e. liquid camphor] flows out from the tree, and it is carried in clefts hewn from [the wood].’
NOTES
(1) The word here should not be taken as referring to the island of Borneo as a whole but rather to a kingdom or state (國) probably located on it. Camphor certainly came from Borneo, although the later reference to ‘Barus fragrance’ suggests that both Bornean and Sumatran camphor were known in China at the time Duàn was writing.
(2) 婆律 Pólǜ (Middle Chinese: ba-lwit [Kroll 2017:348]) can be identified as a reference to Barus in Sumatra. ‘Barus fragrance’ and ‘dragon’s brain’ should both mean ‘camphor’ but Duàn distinguishes them nonetheless. This may have marked a distinction between grades of camphor, although I suppose one would need to delve into the Chinese medical literature to find out. (Let me know if you’ve seen anything along these lines.)
Ibn Khurradādhbih (ابن خرداذبه)
In the Book of Routes and Kingdoms (كتاب المسالك والممالك) written by Ibn Khurradādhbih (aka Ibn Khordadhbeh) in around 870, we find this short description of the island of Zābaj (i.e. southern Sumatra — but see notes), supposedly the place where camphor trees grew alongside enormous snakes and other marvels:
TEXT
و في جبل الزابج حيّات عظام تبلع الرجل والجاموس ومنها ما يبتلع الفيل، بها شجر الكافور تظلّ الشجرة مائة إنسان وأكثر وأقل، ينقب أعلى الشجرة فيسيل منها من ماء الكافور عدة جرار، ثم ينقر أسفل من ذلك وسط الشجرة فينساب منها قطع الكافور وهو صمغ ذلك الشجر غير أنه داخله، ثم تبطل تلك الشجرة فتجفّ، وفي هذه الجزيرة عجائب كثيرة لا تحصى
TRANSLATION
‘In the mountains of Zābaj (1), there are enormous snakes which swallow men and buffaloes, some of which devour even elephants, (2) [and] there is the camphor tree. The tree gives shade to a hundred men more or less. (3) The top of the tree is bored into and several jars of liquid camphor ooze out. Then the tree is tapped below the middle and from it come the pieces of camphor, which is the gum of that tree, though it is inside [the wood]. Then that tree dies and dries up. (4) And on this island there are countless marvels.’
NOTES
(1) Zābaj is generally agreed to be southern Sumatra — a name for the Buddhist kingdom of Śrīvijaya, based at Palembang. It seems to be derived from the word Jawa (i.e. ‘Java’ in Malay, Javanese, etc.) and can be found in other Arabic texts on Southeast Asia from the same period (including the works of Sulaymān the Merchant and Abū Zayd al-Sīrāfī), and also a later one in Armenian. Since the origin of that constellation of names is rather controversial I’m not going to go into too much detail on the topic here. It is interesting to note, however, that Ibn Khurradādhbih also uses the name Jāba(h) for at least one more Southeast Asian islands, also clearly derived from Jawa and perhaps more likely to refer to the island of Java as we now know it. This name can also be found in Muḥammad al-Idrīsī’s Tabula Rogeriana, a world atlas created for Roger II of Sicily in 1154 (Fig. 3):
Fanṣur/Fanṣūr (فنصور), the common Arabic name for the camphor-producing region of Barus in Sumatra, derived from a local toponym in the vicinity of Barus, is not found in The Book of Routes and Kingdoms, but we do find the term Bālūs (بالوس) — surely a reference to the same place. (See here for more on Barus.)
(2) In later Arabic texts, you’ll often come across the idea that camphor groves were guarded by dangerous animals or that camphor-finding expeditions were exceptionally hazardous affairs. This may be a result of Ibn Khurradādhbih’s having described both killer snakes and camphor trees in the same section of text. There are (or were) plenty of hazards in Sumatra’s forests, but camphor trees probably weren’t any more protected by tigers and snakes than other parts of the forest.
(3) This idea is found in later Arabic texts on camphor, including the fourteenth-century encyclopaedist Shihāb al-Dīn Ahmad al-Nuwayri’s more elaborate description (which also draws on other ninth- and tenth-century texts, and mentions Fanṣūr as the source of the best camphor). The image is certainly evocative (and not entirely inaccurate).
(4) Though the description here isn’t completely correct — going by later accounts of camphor processing, the trees were probably cut up and the wood itself was carted off for sale — it is considerably more accurate than the much later (fourteenth-century) description of camphor by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who claimed that the substance came from a reed rather than a tree.
The translations here aren’t definitive and can certainly be improved on. This is particularly true with regard to the Arabic text. I’ve been learning Arabic recently but I’m still very much a beginner, and I have relied to some extent on Charles Barbier de Meynard’s flawed 1865 French rendition of The Book of Routes and Kingdoms (which I’m quite sure isn’t the best possible text). (I should also perhaps point out that there are a couple of other medieval Arabic works with the same title.) If you have any notes, don’t hesitate to let me know.
Anyway, this is just a short update to the blog for the holidays. I haven’t posted anything for a while. It felt like it was time to post something to keep the blog alive.
A. J. West — Leiden, 2020
References
Allsen, Thomas T. 2004 [2001]. Culture and conquest in Mongol Eurasia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barbier de Meynard, Charles. 1865. Le livre des routes et des provinces par Ibn-Khordadbeh. Journal Asiatique ou recueil de mémoires, d’extraits et de notices relatifs à l’histoire, a la philosophie, aux langues et à la littérature des peuples orientaux. Série 6. Tome 5.
Donkin, R. A. 1999. Dragon’s brain perfume. Leiden: Brill.
Kroll, Paul M. 2017. A student’s dictionary of classical and medieval Chinese. Leiden: Brill.
