XI. A MIRROR FROM WESTERN INDIA
Liang se kung tse ki, ‘Memoirs of the Four Lords of the Liang Dynasty (502-556)’ written by Chang Yue (667-730), statesman, poet, painter. “The story connected in this report with the crystal mirror is a somewhat abrupt and incomplete version of the well-known legend of the Diamond Valley, the oldest hitherto accessible Western version of which is contained in the writings of Epiphanius, Bishop of Constantia in Cyprus (circa 315-403)” (Laufer).
“A large junk of Fu-nan which had hailed from western India arrived (in China) and offered for sale a mirror of a peculiar variety of rock-crystal,[^1] one foot and four inches across its surface, and forty catties in weight. It was pure white and transparent on the surface and in the interior, and displayed many-coloured things on its obverse. When held against the light and examined, its substance was not discernible.[^2] On inquiry for the price, it was given at a million strings of copper coins. The Emperor ordered the officials to raise this sum, but the treasury did not hold enough. Those traders said, ‘This mirror is due to the action of the Devarāja of the Rūpadhātu. On felicitous and joyful occasions, he causes the trees of the gods to pour down a shower of precious stones, and the mountains receive them. The mountains conceal and seize the stones, so that they are difficult to obtain. The flesh of big beasts is cast into the mountains; and when the flesh in these hiding places becomes so putrified that it phosphoresces, it resembles a precious stone. Birds carry it off in their beaks, and this is the jewel from which this mirror is made’. Nobody in the empire understood this and dared to pay that price”.[^3]
—Chinese text, cited and translated by Berthold Laufer: Optical Lenses, T’oung Pao, Vol. xvi (1915), pp. 200-02—(cf. Ferrand, JA: 11: 13, pp. 461-2).