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Darcini, the Persian name for cinnamon: what does it tell us?

Susan Weingarten asked me to clarify this. On p. 39 of Dangerous Tastes I describe darcini as an Indian name for Chinese cinnamon (the older, Sanskrit name is tvac). So it is; it's used in Hindi and other modern Indian languages. But what is its origin?

It is a compound word meaning 'Chinese wood', and clearly it is a compound of typical Persian-Urdu form: if it had been formed in Sanskrit, the two elements would appear the other way round. In fact I nearly said in Dangerous Tastes that darcini was a Persian word; I didn't do so, mindful that J T Platts, in the Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English (1884), derives it from two Sanskrit words, daru = wood + ciniya = Chinese; the latter word is not in Monier-Williams's Sanskrit dictionary, incidentally, but cognates are. I wasn't aware when writing Dangerous Tastes that R S McGregor, in the Oxford Hindi-English dictionary (1993), disagrees with Platts, saying that Hindi darcini is a cross between Persian darchin and Hindi cini. Although I don't know where McGregor gets the form darchin, I am sure he is right to trace the word to Persian. My Persian dictionary has darchini and the early Persian medical text by Harawi, dated to c. 970, has (according to the German translation) darsini. Susan Weingarten tells me it occurs, earlier still, in the Babylonian Talmud. Platts is certainly wrong, therefore. The word is really Persian, and quite early. It was borrowed from Persian both into Aramaic and into Urdu/Hindi and other Indian languages.

Thus the word darcini -- showing that in early medieval times the Persians got their cinnamon through the Chinese trade -- becomes one more scrap of evidence of the contacts between late antique Persia and southern China. The evidence I already had, and set out in Dangerous Tastes, concerned jasmine (p. 77).

Garcia de Orta (Coloquios [Goa, 1563]) gives as his explanation of the name darcini that Chinese traders, having unloaded east Asian produce in Sri Lanka, would load up cinnamon from there and take it on westwards to the Persian port of Ormuz; which is likely enough at certain periods. He is attempting to explain the uncomfortable fact, which I also have difficulty explaining, that although the best cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka, scarcely any sources before the end of the medieval period say clearly that Sri Lanka is the source of it.