Ma-i.
The island is flat and broad. It is watered by a double branched stream. The soil is rich. The climate is rather hot. In their customs they are chaste and good. Both men and women do up their hair in a knot behind. They wear a blue cotton shirt. When any woman mourns her husband, she shaves her head and fasts for seven days, lying beside her husband. Most of them nearly die, but if, after seven days, they are not dead, their relatives urge them to eat. Should they get quite well they may not remarry during their whole lives. There are some even who, to make manifest their wifely devotion, when the body of their dead husband has been consumed, get into the funeral pyre and die. At the burial of a chief of renown they put to death two or three thousand slaves to bury with him. The people boil sea-water to make salt, and ferment treacle to make spirits. The native products are cotton, beeswax, tortoise-shell, betelnuts and chintzes. The goods used in trading are caldrons, pieces of iron, colored cotton stuffs, red taffetas, ivory, sycee shoes and the like. The natives and the traders having agreed on prices, they let the former carry off the goods and later on they bring the amount of native products agreed upon. The traders trust them, for they never fail to keep their bargains.
Cf. Chu-fan-chih Hirth and Rockhill, op. sup. cit., 159–162. It refers to the custom of the people building their dwellings along the banks of streams and not in villages. It refers also at length to the honesty of the natives in their dealings with the Chinese traders. The custom of suttee was evidently introduced into the islands subsequent to Chao Ju-kua’s time (1225), brought there of course, from India or Java, otherwise the earlier writer would probably have noted it.