NOTE 4.—­These tattooing artists were probably employed mainly by mariners frequenting the port.  We do not know if the Malays practised tattooing before their conversion to Islam.  But most Indo-Chinese races tattoo, and the Japanese still “have the greater part of the body and limbs scrolled over with bright-blue dragons, and lions, and tigers, and figures of men and women tattooed into their skins with the most artistic and elaborate ornamentation.” (Alcock, I. 191.) Probably the Arab sailors also indulged in the same kind of decoration.  It is common among the Arab women now, and Della Valle speaks of it as in his time so much in vogue among both sexes through Egypt, Arabia, and Babylonia, that he had not been able to escape. (I. 395.)

NOTE 5.—­The divergence in Ramusio’s version is here very notable:  “The River which enters the Port of Zayton is great and wide, running with great velocity, and is a branch of that which flows by the city of Kinsay.  And at the place where it quits the main channel is the city of Tingui, of which all that is to be said is that there they make porcelain basins and dishes.  The manner of making porcelain was thus related to him.  They excavate a certain kind of earth, as it were from a mine, and this they heap into great piles, and then leave it undisturbed and exposed to wind, rain, and sun for 30 or 40 years.  In this space of time the earth becomes sufficiently refined for the manufacture of porcelain; they then colour it at their discretion, and bake it in a furnace.  Those who excavate the clay do so always therefore for their sons and grandsons.  The articles are so cheap in that city that you get 8 bowls for a Venice groat.”

Ibn Batuta speaks of porcelain as manufactured at Zayton; indeed he says positively (and wrongly):  “Porcelain is made nowhere in China except in the cities of Zaitun and Sinkalan” (Canton).  A good deal of China ware in modern times is made in Fo-kien and Canton provinces, and it is still an article of export from T’swan-chau and Amoy; but it is only of a very ordinary kind.  Pakwiha, between Amoy and Chang-chau, is mentioned in the Chinese Commercial Guide (p. 114) as now the place where the coarse blue ware, so largely exported to India, etc., is largely manufactured; and Phillips mentions Tung-’an (about half-way between T’swan-chau and Chang-chau) as a great seat of this manufacture.

Looking, however, to the Ramusian interpolations, which do not indicate a locality necessarily near Zayton, or even in Fo-kien, it is possible that Murray is right in supposing the place intended in these to be really King-te chen in Kiang-si, the great seat of the manufacture of genuine porcelain, or rather its chief mart JAU-CHAU FU on the P’o-yang Lake.