Two Early Descriptions of Camphor Production
By: Medieval Indonesia
Tags: The Middle Ages, Medieval, Indonesia, Spices, Camphor

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.

Figure 1– An illustration of camphor being sold in a late-fourteenth-century northern Italian manuscript of the Latin “Tacuinum Sanitatis” (a translation of a work by the eleventh-century Iraqi Christian scholar Ibn Buṭlān). Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. Ser. N. 2644, f.94r.

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.

Figure 2— Dryobalanops aromatica in the Forest Research Centre, Kuala Lumpur. Source.

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.