CHAPTER XVI
Concerning the Kingdom of Tippera.
Some persons
up to this hour believe that the Kingdom of Pegu bounds China, and I
myself shared this error until three merchants of the Kingdom of
Tippera corrected me. They passed as Brahmans in the hope that they
might be treated with special respect, but they were in truth only
merchants who came to Patna and Dacca, where I saw them, to buy coral,
yellow amber, tortoise-shell, and sea-shell bracelets, and
other toys which, as I have said in the preceding chapter, are made in
these two towns of Bengal. I saw one of them at Dacca, and met the two
others at Patna, and invited them to dine with me. They were people who
spoke but little, either because it was their nature, or the usual
custom of their country ; one of them knew the Indian language. When
they bought anything they made their calculations with small stones
resembling agates, and of the size of the finger nail, upon which there
were figures. They each had scales made like steelyards.1 The arms were not of iron, but of a kind of wood as hard as bresil,2
and the ring which held the weights, when put in the arm to mark the
livres, was a strong loop of silk. By this means they weighed from a
dram up to ten of our livres. If all the inhabitants of the Kingdom of
Tippera resemble these two merchants whom I met at Patna, one might
conclude that this nation loves drinking very much ; and I experienced
a pleasure in giving them sometimes spirits, sometimes Spanish wine,
and other kinds, such as those of Shlraz, Rheims, and Mantua, never
having been without a supply in all my journeys, except during the
last, in the deserts of Arabia, which I was unable to traverse in less
than sixty-five days, for the reasons I have elsewhere stated. I should
have been able to learn
1 See H. Ling Roth, ' Oriental Steelyards and Bismars', Journal, Royal Anthropological Institute, xlii, 1912, p. 200 fi.
2 The Brazil wood of commerce is at present derived from Caesalpinia Brasiliensis, a native of Pemambuco. (Ency. Brit., iv. 463.) The Indian Sappan wood is Csesalpinia Sappan : Watt, Economic Products, 194 fi. (See Yule, Hobson-Jobson, 113.)
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