The fourteenth-century English writer and traveller Sir John Mandeville is rarely cited for the trustworthiness of the observations that he gathered during his alleged travels to Asia in the 1320s. In his Travels he says to his readers that in India grew ‘a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungrie.’ He was describing a cotton tree, whose illustration came to be one of the wonders of the Orient (Figure 3.1). Europeans knew cotton textiles and by this time had access to raw cotton from the Near East, but few of them had actually seen a cotton boll with their eyes. Europeans were not the only ones to have little familiarity with cotton. Before the sixteenth century hardly anyone in Japan had seen a cotton plant, though by this time the Japanese were avid consumers of cotton textiles. This lack of knowledge was perceived as such a major failure that the sixteenth-century Chronology of Japanese History narrates how it was a young man, speaking Chinese and coming from Southeast Asia, who made the first attempt to introduce cotton to Japan when he was swept ashore in a small boat in the summer of the year 799 CE. Tradition maintains that he brought cotton seeds with him. The seeds were washed, soaked and planted in different parts of the country. Yet, they did not grow to become plants. Japan had to wait several centuries until cotton cultivation was finally successfully introduced.