Page 250 - Ming_China_Courts_and_Contacts_1400_1450 Craig lunas

Despite the fact that Tao does discuss other types of ‘red guo 寳國 (‘the Pure Land’), bao shu 寳樹 (‘the jewel-trees of
stones’, it still seems likely that a ‘red yagu’ is what today we the Pure Land’), bao zang 寳藏, for Buddhism itself, and bao
are calling a ruby or a spinel. They were, on Ma Huan’s che 寳車 (‘the precious cart’), i.e. the one vehicle, the
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testimony, available at many points on the Indian Ocean Mahāyāna. If a ‘jewel cart’, bao che 寳車, had such a
littoral, at Aden for instance, in addition to those places meaning, it is hard to imagine that a baochuan 寳船, (‘jewel
already mentioned. At Hormuz on the Persian Gulf there ship’, as the mightiest of Zheng He’s ships were called),
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were red yagu but also red la 剌, which Mills identifies as the lacked such resonances altogether. We might also recall the
Persian word lal, meaning the balas ruby or spinel. It might concept of the Buddhist ‘three jewels’ (San bao 三寳),
be speculated that these are in fact the same stones as the lazi referenced in Zheng He’s inscription of Xuande 11 [1431],
蠟子 which are mentioned in the antiquarian text Ge gu yao recounting the miracles of the goddess Tianfei at Changle,
lun 格古要論 of 1388 as coming from ‘the Southern and and which later became attached to the man himself in
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Western Barbarian regions’ and as being ‘often [found] literature and folklore. Ma Huan, we might remember,
embossed on bracelets, bowls, cups and rings’. Spinels were reports the Sri Lankan belief that gems are the tears of the
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mined at Badakhshan, which straddles the modern Buddha, a rare case in which not just actual gems but the
Afghanistan/Tajikistan border and was then within the lore about gems is being translated into the imaginary of the
Timurid empire, to which the coastal city-state of Hormuz Ming empire. The term bao is also equally often seen as an
was then theoretically a vassal. The fact that Ma Huan’s attribute of sovereignty, as in terms such as bao zuo 寶座
only specific mention of la comes in relation to the closest (‘throne’), or the bao xun 寳訓 (‘Precious Instructions’), a set
point he got to the Timurid empire is not without interest. of texts ‘containing the most important imperial edicts and
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Hormuz was also, Ma tells us, the source of ‘fine vessels of orders … officially ordered for publication’, or even the tong
jade’ (mei yu qi min 美玉器皿), attesting to its connections with bao 通寳 (‘circulating treasure’), coins which bore the
the sources of that stone deep in Central Asia, in an area also imperial reign mark and were issued only by the Ming state.
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not at that point under Ming control. Badakhshan is We might also ask to what extent gems were important
almost certainly the source of the magnificent 170-carat simply because they came from outside the Ming. Like the
spinel stone in the British crown jewels known romantically appearance of a tribute qilin from Bengal, they partake of the
since the early 19th century as the ‘Black Prince’s Ruby’, first concept of rui 瑞, the numinous or auspicious aspect of
recorded in 1685 but quite possibly in circulation well before unusual phenomena. This is perhaps particularly so in the
that. There is no direct evidence for gems as part of the case of rubies, in that they seem to have a rather limited
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‘tribute’ brought by any of the 78 official Timurid missions to history in China prior to the Yuan period, when they appear
the Ming court between 1387 and 1504 (unless they are bearing a foreign name and trailing all the allure of the
concealed under the generic label of fang wu 方物, ‘local exotic. Two balas rubies, or spinels, were indeed found,
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products’). However, as in the case of the rubies of Mogok, along with a cache of other gemstones (sapphires, topaz,
this does not mean that the spinels of Badakhshan did not chalcedony), inside a magnificent Tang dynasty (618–906)
make their way by other means into the Ming empire, and gilded silver pot excavated as part of the Hejiacun hoard in
the Timurid connection, which will be discussed below, is the outskirts of Xi’an in 1970. But it remains the case that for
certainly an important one. this early period ‘rubies are not easily identifiable in literary
If we turn from issues of supply to those of consumption, and historical sources’, and even the exhaustive erudition of
we might ask what gems mean in the Ming context. In her the great scholar of exotic imports to early China, Edward
magisterial cultural history of gemstones and jewellery in Schafer, cannot cite a Tang Chinese word which refers
the early modern West, the art historian Marcia Pointon has specifically to a ruby or spinel; they were little known (and
written, ‘Jewellery exists both as a unique material certainly not written about) then. However, they
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manifestation that blends the natural world with the skill predominate visually in the Ming material from the half
and ingenuity of human endeavour and as ideas circulated century 1400–50, and, as we have seen, are numerically the
and debated’. It acts as ‘a means of conveying what is most largest single group of stones in the Prince Zhuang of Liang
precious in a non-material as well as a material sense’. For tomb. Does this prominence relate simply to more copious
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China, we have barely begun to think about these issues, sources of supply at this period, following on from the
and the literature on gems is very meagre in comparison to exploitation of both land and sea routes of engagement with
that on the cultural value of, for example, jade. So what the rest of Eurasia? Or does it relate to changed tastes on the
follows has to be speculative, an agenda for further work part of the Chinese elite, tastes which they might perhaps
rather than settled conclusions, and is meant as a suggestion have shared with contemporaries elsewhere? It certainly
of several possible lines of enquiry. seems to be the case that there was something of a craze for
One of these might be to think more intensively about the rubies, for gems of a predominantly red hue (as indeed there
religious symbolism of jewels, in its relationship to actual was for red ceramics), in many of the courts of Eurasia in the
material culture. A modern listing of Chinese Buddhist 14th and early 15th centuries. Rashid al-Din describes the
terminology makes the point about bao 寳 – ‘jewel’ or ‘gem’ garden laid out by the Ilkhanid Ghazan Khan near Tabriz
– that ‘this term often qualifies that which touches on the in 1302, with its ‘golden throne inlaid with rubies and other
Buddha or Buddhism’. This is certainly borne out by the gems’. In the same part of the world a century later, rubies
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standard English dictionary of Chinese Buddhist terms, and spinels were to be the Timurid gem par excellence, as
which has no fewer than 44 entries where bao is the when the gardens of the emir Timur himself were described
headword; these include bao dian 寳典 (‘the scriptures’), bao in Persian poetry in these terms:

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