ASIATIC NATIONS. l65 been concerned in the transaction in which this last intercourse is alluded to. Independent, in- deed, of European or Arabian testimony, we have the express authority of native records for the fact of an intercourse existing with the Arabs in Ter- naii, near a century and a half, and with the Ja- vanese for a still longer period, before any notice whatever is taken of the Chinese. By the Chinese accounts, their intercourse with the Indian islands is stated to have been very early. The P. Amirot and De Guignes the elder, mention, on the authority of Chinese annals, a country of the Indian islands which they term ivowa- oua. Tliis is supposed by commentators to have been Borneo or Java ; but it is more consonant to the ignorance and imperfection of the intercourse of the Chinese to imagine that it applies generalljj to all the countries of the Archipelago rather tlian to any 07ie in particular. Han T'oko, a most acute and intelligent Chinese of Surabaia, in Java, well versed in the literature of China, and fiuniliar with the Malay language and the customs of Java, sup- plied me with some account of the country alluded to by Amiot and De Guignes, from a Chinese work printed at Pekin in the reign of Kanhi. The following is an abstract of the narrative it gives. The country, it states, was formerly called Cha-po, but now Jao-wa. This country became first known to the Chinese in the reign of an Em-
