The English ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, sent to the court of Shah Jehangir by King James I, saw the Shah on the day of his great birthday festival when he was weighed against a great variety of objects, jewels, gold, silver, stuffs of gold and silver, silk, butter, rice, fruits, etc. All these things, heaped up on the scale balancing the one in which stood the Shah, were distributed as imperial gifts after the conclusion of the ceremony. Sir Thomas Roe declares that on this occasion (he missed seeing the actual weighing) the monarch was adorned with a great array of jewels, and he adds: “I must confess I never saw at one time such unspeakable wealth,” a testimony of considerable value, for the English Court in the time of James I was one by no means poor in jewels, that sovereign having a great fondness for them. After the ceremony of weighing had been completed, Jehangir enjoyed the spectacle of a procession of twelve troupes of his choicest elephants, each troupe led by a “lord elephant of exceptional stature.” The finest of these had all the plates on his head and breast set with rubies and emeralds, and all the elephants as they neared the Shah saluted him with their trunks.[545] In Persia the pink and red coral was believed to have acquired its beautiful color after removal from the water, and the odor of the material was said to be a trustworthy means of discriminating between genuine and imitation coral; genuine coral had the smell of sea-water. The Chinese and the Hindus prized this substance very highly, because among them it was used to adorn the images of the gods.[546] The perforated jade disk called _ts’ang pi_ is still used as the symbol of the deity Heaven (T’ien) in the temple of that divinity at Peking. By a regulation of Emperor K’ien-lung, the proper dimensions of this ceremonial disk were rigidly established; the diameter of the disk proper was set at 6.1 inches, and its thickness at ⁷⁄₁₀ of an inch; the perforation was to have a diameter of ⁴⁄₁₀ of an inch. While the quality of the jade to be employed is not especially determined, the name _ts’ang_ implies jade of a bluish shade. The veined type of stone is regarded as peculiarly adapted for this purpose.[547] [Illustration: PERFORATED JADE DISK CALLED _TS’ANG PI_, A CHINESE SYMBOL OF THE DEITY HEAVEN (T’IEN) From Berthold Laufer, “Jade, a Study in Chinese Archæology and Religion,” Chicago, 1912, p. 157. By courtesy of the Author and Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago. ]