Cassia, under the name of Kwei, is mentioned in the earliest Chinese herbal,—that of the emperor Shen-nung, who reigned about 2700 b.c., in the ancient Chinese[1922] Classics, and in the Rh-ya, a herbal dating from 1200 b.c. In the Hai-yao-pên-ts’ao, written in the 8th century, mention is made of Tien-chu kwei. Tien-chu is the ancient name for India: perhaps the allusion may be to the cassia bark of Malabar.
In connexion with these extremely early references to the spice, it may be stated that a bark supposed to be cassia is mentioned as imported into Egypt together with gold, ivory, frankincense, precious woods, and apes, in the 17th century b.c.[1923]
The accounts given by Dioscorides, Ptolemy and the author of the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, indicate that cinnamon and cassia were obtained from Arabia and Eastern Africa; and we further know that the importers were Phœnicians, who traded by Egypt and the Red Sea with Arabia. Whether the spice under notice was really a production of Arabia or Africa, or whether it was imported thither from Southern China (the present source of the best sort of cassia), is a question which has excited no small amount of discussion.
We are in favour of the second alternative,—firstly, because no substance of the nature of cinnamon is known to be produced in Arabia or Africa; and secondly, because the commercial intercourse which was undoubtedly carried on by China with India and Arabia, and which also existed between Arabia, India and Africa, is amply sufficient to explain the importation of Chinese produce.[1924] That the spice was a production of the far East is moreover implied by the name Darchini (from dar, wood or bark, and Chini, Chinese) given to it by the Arabians and Persians.
If this view of the case is admissible, we must regard the ancient cinnamon to have been the substance now known as Chinese Cassia lignea or Chinese Cinnamon, and cassia as one of the thicker and perhaps less aromatic barks of the same group, such in fact as are still found in commerce.
Of the circumstances which led to the collection of cinnamon in Ceylon, and of the period at which it was commenced, nothing is known. That the Chinese were concerned in the discovery is not an unreasonable supposition, seeing that they traded to Ceylon, and were in all probability acquainted with the cassia-yielding species of Cinnamomum of Southern China, a tree extremely like the cinnamon tree of Ceylon.
Whatever may be the facts, the early notices of cinnamon as a production of Ceylon are not prior to the 13th century. The very first, according to Yule,[1925] is a mention of the spice by Kazwini, an Arab writer of about a.d. 1275, very soon after which period it is noticed by the historian of the Egyptian Sultan Kelaoun, a.d. 1283. The prince of Ceylon is stated to have sent an ambassador, Al-Hadj-Abu-Othman, to the Sultan’s court. It was mentioned that Ceylon produced elephants, Bakam (the wood of Cæsalpinia Sapan L.—[see page 216]), pearls and also cinnamon.[1926]
A still more positive evidence is due to the Minorite friar, John of Montecorvino, a missionary who visited India. This man, in a letter under date December 20th, 1292 or 1293, written at “Mabar, città dell’ India di sopra,” and still extant in the Medicean library at Florence, says that the cinnamon tree is of medium bulk, and in trunk, bark and foliage, like a laurel, and that great store of its bark is carried forth from the island which is near by Malabar.[1927]
Again, it is mentioned by the Mahomedan traveller Ibn Batuta about a.d. 1340,[1928] and a century later by the Venetian merchant Nicolo di Conti, whose description of the tree is very correct.[1929]
The circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope led to the real discovery of Ceylon by the Portuguese in 1505, and to their permanent occupation of the island in 1536, chiefly for the sake of the cinnamon. It is from the first of these dates that more exact accounts of the spice began to reach Europe. Thus in 1511 Barbosa distinguished the fine cinnamon of Ceylon from the inferior Canella trista of Malabar. Garcia de Orta, about the middle of the same century, stated that Ceylon cinnamon was forty times as dear as that of Malabar. Clusius, the translator of Garcia, saw branches of the cinnamon tree as early as 1571 at Bristol and in Holland.