corundum, history.1, Sri Lanka.12, Thailand.12, China.12, gems

Ma Huan’s account of countries encountered during three of Zheng He’s early fifteenth-century maritime expeditions describes ports, rulers, religious practices, customs, natural products, and commercial exchange across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. J.V.G. Mills’s translation, based on Feng Ch’eng-Chün’s edited Chinese text, supplements the narrative with an extensive historical introduction, annotations, maps, and appendices on navigation and geographical identification. Of particular gemological interest is the description of Ceylon, where red, blue, and yellow stones termed ya-ku are identified in the commentary as ruby and blue and yellow sapphire. Ma Huan describes collecting gemstones from sand exposed or carried down by heavy rain and records the belief that gems were the crystallized tears of Buddha. His account also describes royal supervision of pearl recovery, with oysters left to decay before the pearls were washed out and delivered to officials, although some pearls were stolen and sold abroad. The Calicut section provides unusually detailed evidence of trading procedures: brokers and officials established exchange terms by a formal handclasp, after which merchants brought precious stones, pearls, and coral for examination and prolonged price negotiation. It also records customs collection and a jeweled gold girdle sent as tribute to China. These passages place gems within interconnected systems of local production, merchant exchange, royal revenue, religious belief, and diplomatic gift-giving, making the work an important early source for the history of Asian gemstone commerce.