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Plate 27.5 Gold belt set with gems excavated from the tomb of Zhu Zhanji, Prince Zhuang of Liang, and of Lady Wei at Zhongxiang, Hubei
province. Yongle or Hongxi period, c. 1403–25, Nanjing or Beijing. Gold, precious and semi-precious gems, total length 65cm, overall
weight 641.9g; largest piece: height 6cm, width 3.5cm. Hubei Provincial Museum

voyages, Ma Huan, tells us that, in Java, ‘Gold, all kinds of Ocean Shores, where he writes, a propos of the mountain ‘at
precious stones (bao shi 寶石), and all varieties of foreign the side of the king’s residence’:
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goods are sold in great profusion’; Java was a port of trade, The interior of the mountain produces red yagu 雅姑, blue yagu,
not a point of gem production, and his note demonstrates yellow yagu, blue milan 米藍 stones, xilani 昔剌泥, kumolan 窟沒藍,
merely that Chinese private or court-sponsored agents did and other such [stones]; they have each and every precious
not have to go directly to the mines to get the stones. He stone. Whenever heavy rain occurs, the water rushes out of the
remarks too on the ready availability of gemstones in earth and flows down amidst the sand; they search for and
Xianluo (which played the same port-of-trade role), and on collect [the stones], and that is how they get them. There is a
the gem-trading activities (still pursued today) of the common saying that the precious stones are in truth the
crystallised tears of Buddha the patriarch.
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Chettiar merchants of Cochin (now Kochi) and Calicut
(now Kozhikode) in modern Kerala, on the southwest coast J.V.G. Mills, Ma Huan’s translator and editor, has done
of India; however, these were again principally middlemen, his best to make sense of the terminology here, as heir to a
rather than mining entrepreneurs. An equally or even long tradition of learned wrangling going back at least to the
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more likely source of rubies for the early Ming court was the great French sinologist, and notably combative
island of Sri Lanka, the crucial point of intersection controversialist, Paul Pelliot (1878–1945). However, there is
between the trade routes of the eastern and western parts of very little point in trying to work out what such terms ‘really’
the Indian Ocean, and a land of semi-mythical riches, mean in contemporary parlance, or to tie 15th-century usage
identified for example by Arab writers as the original site of to modern definitions on a one-to-one basis. The naming of
Eden, and by the Venetian traveller Niccolò de’ Conti gemstones has always been (and remains) unstable and
(1395–1469), who was in Asia at the very time of the Zheng fluctuating, touching as it does on essentially unresolvable
He voyages, as a particularly rich source of gems. In 1283, issues of the intersection between cultural value, commercial
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one of Sri Lanka’s rulers had written to a Mamluk sultan of worth and the chemistry of rocks. But what is important to
Egypt with the proud boast: ‘I have a prodigious quantity of note in the early Ming context is that the terminology is not
pearls and precious stones of every kind’, while at least five in origin Chinese, but is borrowed from neighbouring
diplomatic missions to the Ming from King languages, as part of the interaction of Arab, Persian and
Parakramabahu VI (r. 1412–68) took place between 1416 Mongol vocabularies with Chinese, attendant on the
and 1459, and the island was the site of one of Zheng He’s Chinggisid hegemony in Eurasia. Yagu is from the Arabic
most forceful interventions, testified to on the trilingual yāqūt and first appears in the late Yuan text Nan cun chuo geng
Galle stele inscription, with its implicit claim that Chinese lu 南村輟耕錄 of 1366 by Tao Zongyi 陶宗儀 (c. 1316–
(not Sinhala) is the successor to Sanskrit as the central c. 1402), in his discussion of various kinds of ‘Muslim stones’
Buddhist language. Sri Lanka is the subject of the longest (huihui shitou 囘囘石頭), although he uses the much more
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single gem-related passage in Ma Huan’s Overall Survey of the complicated graphic forms 鴉鶻 to render the word yagu.

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