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According to the book Yiyuan Cihuang: The vegetable p’olang, was introduced as seeds from the country p’olang, and hence named. Nowadays its name is written with the 艸 radical, as ‘菠薐’.
Berthold Laufer in his book Sino-Iranica observed that there was a country known from inscriptions called पालक्क(pālakka), which likely lies in present-day Palakkad, Kerala, in Southern India. He conjectured that at the time of introduction of the vegetable, the monks from Nepal also brought with them their own folk etymology of the association between the plant name and the toponym/country name.[1] Compare modern Hindiपालक(pālak, “spinach”).
Seeds of the vegetable spinach were originally brought here by monks from the western country , like alfalfa and grape which were introduced by Zhang Qian.
^ Berthold Laufer (1919) Sino-Iranica: Chinese contributions to the history of civilization in ancient Iran, with special reference to the history of cultivated plants and products, pages 397-398:
As a matter of fact, spinach is a vegetable of the temperate zones and alien to tropical regions. A genuine Sanskrit word for the spinach is unknown. Nevertheless Chinese po-liṅ, *pwa-liṅ, must represent the transcription of some Indian vernacular name. In Hindustānī we have palak as designation for the spinach, and palaṅ or palak as name for Beta vulgaris, Puštu pālak, apparently developed from Sanskrit pālaṅka, pālankya, palakyū, pālakyā, to which our dictionaries attribute the meaning “a kind of vegetable, a kind of beet-root, Beta bengalensis”; in Bengālī paluṅ. To render the coincidence with the Chinese form complete, there is also Sanskrit Pālakka or Pālaka as the name of a country, which has evidently resulted in the assertion of Buddhist monks that the spinach must come from a country Paliṅga. The Nepalese, accordingly, applied a word relative to a native plant to the newly-introduced spinach, and, together with the product, handed this word on to China...