by Robin Brown
A day’s journey to the south-east of Kin-sai, through a countryside rich in houses, villas and delightful gardens producing an abundance of vegetables, brings one to the very large and handsome city of Ta-pin-zu. It is under the jurisdiction of Kin-sai, the people are all idolaters, burn their dead and use paper money, but otherwise it is of no special interest. Travelling in these parts you are continually passing through towns, seeing castles and other habitations so extensive that they give the appearance of being one continuous city. Everything required for the good life is produced in great abundance and they have bamboo canes here a foot or so thick and some 45 feet long.
If you continue to the south-east again, you pass through densely populated agricultural land. These provinces of Manji do not have many sheep but there are oxen, cows, buffalo, goats and a huge number of pigs. A further three days of travel brings one to the pretty city of Zen Gian built upon a hill in the middle of the river, embraced, as it were, by two streams, one of which branches to the north-west the other to the south-east. All these cities pay allegiance to the Grand Khan and are dependent upon Kin-sai. This is a country of abundant game, both birds and beasts.
Three days more on the road brings one to the large and noble city of Gie-za which is the limit of Kin-sai’s authority, and after that you enter another kingdom (or vice-royalty) of Manji, known as Kon-cha, where the principal city is Fu-jiu.
I travelled on from here for six days through hills and valleys, never out of sight of towns and villages where food is abundant and there is much field sport, particularly birding. You have to be very careful of tigers of great size and strength. It is a centre for the production of medicinal plants like ginger, galangal and tea. A Venetian silver groat buys you 80lb weight of fresh ginger! There is also a plant here that has the colour, smell and properties of saffron but which it is not. It is used extensively in the local cooking and as such fetches a high price.
But what makes this part of the country unique is the appetite of the local inhabitants for human flesh. They regard it as of a more delicate flavour than all other, provided, of course, that the person has not died of some foul disease.
You should also see them go into battle! They loosen their long hair so that it falls about their ears and paint their faces bright blue. Armed with lances and spears they make their assault on foot, all except the chief who is on horseback. They have a reputation for appalling savagery for, having slain their enemy, they eat their flesh and drink the blood.
At the end of the six days you reach the large city of Kue-lin-fu which features three spectacular bridges upwards of 300 feet long and 24 feet wide.
The women here are very beautiful and live lives of ultimate ease. Raw silk is produced and manufactured into a variety of silk cloths. Cotton is also woven and dyed into coloured clothes exported all over Manji. There is also lots of ginger and galangal. I was told of an extraordinary domestic fowl here which has no feathers but is covered in black hair like a cat. Nevertheless it lays eggs and is very good to eat. This is also tiger country, of which there are such a multitude that travelling can be quite dangerous – in fact it is best to go in company.
This whole area is rich in castles and towns where silk is produced in abundance by an essentially idolatrous population. A centre for the production of sugar, Un-guen is three days further on. Almost all its output is sent to Kanbula to supply the royal court.
Before Un-guen was conquered by the armies of the Grand Khan the manufacture of fine quality sugar was unknown and they never produced anything better than a boiled dark brown paste. In Kublai’s court at the time, however, there were some people from Babylon who were sent to Un-guen to teach the locals how to refine sugar using the ashes of certain woods.
Fifteen miles further on is Kan-gui, the headquarters of a large army charged with the protection (and the suppression in the event of rebellion) of all the cities in Kon-cha. A river a mile wide flows through the city flanked by extensive, imposing buildings. A great number of ships are berthed here, loading various merchandise, especially sugar. It is also a port for large numbers of vessels from India bringing rich cargos of jewels and pearls, all sold at a considerable profit. The ships are able to navigate up the river from the sea which is no great distance away. It is a beautiful place, rich in all the good things of life and with delightful gardens producing exquisite fruits.
Cross the river and travel five days to the south-east, all the time past numerous towns, castle and substantial houses, you will arrive at noble, handsome Zai-tun with its busy port on the coast. This is a journey over hills, across plains and through woods in which are found many plants from which camphor is produced. Zai-tun is a very busy port through which imports are sent to all parts of Manji. I would estimate that the well-known trade in pepper, which travels from here to Alexandria to supply the Western world, amounts to no more than a hundredth part of that which is imported through Zai-tun. In fact, it is impossible for anyone to convey the extent and variety of the merchandise that flows through this, one of the largest and most commodious ports in the world.
The Grand Khan derives vast revenues from this trade as every merchant is obliged to pay customs duty of 10 per cent. In addition there are their shipping costs: about 30 per cent for every boatload of fine goods, 44 per cent for pepper and 40 per cent for lignum, aloes, sandalwood, medicinal drugs and trade in general. Nevertheless, even though the charges, customs and freight can amount to half the value of a cargo, their profit is still considerable. They are very happy to return to this market with further stocks of merchandise.
The countryside around here is delightful. Although the people are idolaters they have goods aplenty and they are by nature peaceable and very fond of the easy, indulgent life. Many people come to this city to get tattooed and the artists who engage in this work are much celebrated.
The large river that runs by Zai-tun, which is actually a branch of the river passing Kin-sai, is very swift. Where the river divides you find the city of Tin-gui, famous for the manufacture of porcelain bowls, dishes and cups. Porcelain is made as follows. A certain kind of earth is dug up from what might be termed a mine and is then left in heaps to be weathered by the sun, wind and rain for between forty or fifty years, during all of which time it must not be disturbed. The process refines it to a material suitable for shaping into the vessels I have mentioned. Colours are then laid on the clay and afterwards it is baked in an oven or furnace. Great quantities of porcelain ware are sold in the city and for a Venetian groat you can get eight cups.
There is one other place in the kingdom of Manji from which the Grand Khan draws as much revenue as Kin-sai and that is the viceroyalty of Kon-cha. I should just note here that while the people of Manji speak one language there is a great diversity of dialects, just as there is between Genoese, Milanese and Florentines.
But it is time I brought this account of Cathay and Manji, the two great fiefdoms of China, to a close and moved on to mighty India which may be divided into Greater, Lesser and Middle India and which I was fortunate to be able to visit in the service of the Grand Khan. I went there on the King’s business on a number of occasions and also with my father and uncle when Kublai, although reluctant to use us, charged us with the task of providing a safe escort for a princess betrothed to King Argon of Persia. Needless to say, this was a journey of many extraordinary adventures but you shall also hear some of the stories I was told along the way by reliable people and some privileged information I was given about charts to the Indian coastline.
Book Three
INTRODUCTION
We come now to the Third Book, in which Marco Polo, after seventeen (or possibly eighteen) years in the service of Kublai Khan, tells the incredible story of how he beguiled Kublai, now an ageing and cantankerous absolute dictator, into allowing him and his family to go home to Venice.
Marco was about forty years old and had survived several Tartar wars, serious illnesses (from one of which he took a year to recover), a
ttacks by robbers on the roads he travelled as Kublai’s ambassador, murderers who believed their religion would be served by killing strangers, battles in the van of the Grand Khan’s final assault on China, lethal enemies made at court and immense natural hazards such as he encountered during the first climb by a Westerner on to the ‘Roof of the World’ (the Pamir Plateau) and crossing the Gobi Desert on foot. Moreover, Kublai Khan was bitterly opposed to his going. And the Grand Khan was not at this time a man to be argued with!
From the way this altercation is described in the introductory material in Book One, I actually wonder whether Marco himself wanted that much to leave Kublai’s court. The account of the row is briefly told (in the third person), some believe by Rustichello, Marco’s ghostwriter. Marco never actually records this seminal event himself. Instead, Nicolo Polo, Marco’s father, is recorded as one day ‘taking the opportunity when he observed him [Kublai] to be more than usually cheerful, of throwing himself at his feet and soliciting on behalf of himself and of his family to be indulged with his majesty’s gracious permission for their departure’. The request went down like a lead brick!
‘He appeared hurt at the application,’ Nicolo records. In fact, Kublai went so far as to question their sanity, doubting whether they would survive the dangers of the return trip. He also tried to bribe them out of going, offering to double their salaries and grant them any honours they desired. Then, when all that failed, he simply said no ‘positively’ (as the text politely puts it). There the matter rested – you argued with Kublai Khan at your extreme peril – and had fate not intervened, the Polos would simply have been three more merchants lost to Asia.
What seems to have shifted Marco’s opinion about leaving and his involvement in the escape plot was Kublai’s age – he was about eighty, a very old man for the times. It is understandable that his father and uncle, also ageing, and who appear to have remained simply merchants throughout their time in Asia, would have wanted to go home and enjoy their well-earned, immense wealth in civilised Venice.
Not so much Marco. He had left the place as a teenager and he now enjoyed a rich and extraordinarily influential role at the court of the most powerful monarch on earth, the ruler of three-quarters of the world. If he went back to Venice his status would be that of merchant, albeit rather a rich one. He must also have had severe doubts that anyone would believe his incredible story because almost three years were to elapse before he thought of writing it down, and he would do so then only because he was in gaol with nothing better to do. As we now know, these fears were well founded. He would be Marco Millione, the grand liar, and was still protesting – ‘I have not told half of what I saw’ – on his deathbed.
But Marco was persuaded by his family that in the light of Kublai’s extreme old age they’d best get out while they could. Again the text politely presents their difficulties as: ‘His death, if it should happen previously to their departure, might deprive them of that public assistance by which alone they could expect to surmount the innumerable difficulties of so long a journey.’ This, frankly, is the one and only grand understatement in the whole book. Without Kublai’s golden passport these three were as good as dead, or at best trapped, in a court and country where they had made many enemies. As it was, and in spite of the Grand Khan’s blessing, it still took them some four years to fight their way home.
Interestingly, it fell to Marco to obtain Kublai’s blessing and that gives us one of the few clear pointers to the unique nature of Marco’s ‘special relationship’ with the Grand Khan; certainly a much closer relationship than that enjoyed by his father and uncle who, on the grounds of their senior status alone, one would assume would have had much more in common with Kublai.
The plot runs as follows. Kublai has been exercised by the last wish of the late Queen of Persia, Bologna, the mighty King Argon’s late Queen, who insisted on her deathbed that her place should only be taken by one of her relatives from Cathay in the dominions of the Grand Khan.
Kublai’s problem was the same as that worrying the Polos. Between his court and the Persian capital a number of Tartar wars were raging. In fact, so fraught with danger was their route that the ambassadors returning to King Argon to tell him that a suitable new bride had been chosen had eventually been forced, after travelling for eight months, to turn back to Kublai’s court.
Marco, just home from a long sea voyage to the East Indies in command of a fleet of ships, saw his chance. He went to Kublai and told him that he knew the way to get the princess safely back to Persia by sea. Word of this offer reached Argon’s ambassadors, who had now been away from Persia for three years and could see no hope of getting home overland. They held a meeting with the Polos and afterwards had an audience with Kublai, at which they urged him to honour his commitment to the King of Persia. They took the beautiful young Queen-elect along with them to help persuade him. The journey by sea, they said, would be shorter and cheaper than a land journey but could only be safely commanded by Marco Polo and his relatives because of his recent experience of navigating these waters.
Kublai really did not want the Polos to go – as the text puts it: ‘[he] showed by his countenance that it was exceedingly displeasing to him’ – but he knew there was little alternative as Argon was his most powerful ally. In the end he accepted their offer graciously, extracting a promise from the Polos that when they had stayed a while with their families they would return to him. As things turned out, this was not a promise they needed to keep because by the time they got back to Venice, Kublai had died.
The key to their escape was Marco’s managing to convince Kublai Khan that he had somehow acquired the skills of an oceanic navigator in waters he’d never been near. When did he pick up this knowledge? How did he get away with so outrageous a claim? True, he had recently returned from a sea journey, but this voyage is unlikely to have taken him through the uncharted islands of the Far East where he was now proposing to sail with the princess.
His essential ignorance of Eastern oceans and their landmasses is quickly revealed in Book Three. He takes a stab at describing the vast number of islands and actually puts a figure on them – 7,440! How he came by so exact a count can only be guessed at, indeed I am sure it was a guess.
He’s fascinated, as were all Europeans of the time, by Japan – Zipangu – which virtually no one from the West had visited by this time. He reports on the spectacular disaster that overtook Kublai Khan’s expedition to conquer Japan, surely the Grand Khan’s greatest failure, but this simply adds to his vicarious fascination with the ferocity and brutality of the Japanese, not least that they prefer the flavour of human flesh to all other. Japan is also reported to be layered in gold and enormously rich.
But while stretching credibility with descriptions of islands and landfalls he never visited, unlike most early travel writers he is meticulous about informing his readers when his reports rely on hearsay. The truthfulness of much of his material can also be judged by the small detail. For example, in this book he makes it clear that black and white pepper are ‘products’ (white pepper is produced by blanching the ripe peppercorns) when, right up to the twentieth century, black and white pepper were thought to come from different plants.
Elsewhere his detailed description of whaling in the Indian Ocean, using harpoons tied to heavy lines, reveals that the techniques of whaling did not change for the next six hundred years. Reflecting his deep interest in natural history (the whole manuscript is interspersed with descriptions of natural phenomena) we hear of the ‘great white bear’, sometimes 10 feet long, of the far north; the first Western description of the polar bear.
There are a number of intriguing references, utterly fantastical at first glance, where Marco creates a story out of what is probably just a grain of truth. The best of these is the tale of the strange islands near ‘Succotera’ off the coast of Africa where men and women each have their own island and the men take the women as wives for three months each year. The children are looked after by th
eir mothers until aged twelve when the boys go to the men’s island and the girls enter the marriage market. Marco was ridiculed when he claimed that the inhabitants of these islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden were Christians worshipping the Old Testament and part of the ‘See of Succotera’, but yet again he may have been right.
He may even have mistaken the Succotera islands for the Comoros further south, as all this information is admitted hearsay. The exact whereabouts of the islands is ill-defined, indeed the name has been badly mutilated in the translations. (In the Basle edition it is Sciora, in the older Latin, Scoyran and in the early Italian epitomes, Scorsia.) And it was revealed about thirty years ago that the Comoros, entirely surrounded by Muslims, houses a sect practising a very early form of Solomonic Old Testament Christianity. They believe that they are descended from the ancient Jews.
The Comoros are also a short distance from Madagascar and Madagascar is the next important landmass Marco describes, although he does not claim ever to have been there. Nonetheless his descriptions are quite detailed and he certainly could have picked up his knowledge of the place from the natives of Comoros.
Ships from India and the Persian Gulf visited Madagascar fairly regularly, indeed nearby Zanzibar was ruled by Omani sheiks. It is almost certain that Marco got much of his information from Indian and Arabian mariners who he probably employed to help him pilot his battered fleet across the Indian Ocean and up the Persian Gulf.
Almost certainly because they are hearsay the stories Marco Millione tells of Madagascar are among the most fantastical in the book. But as is so often the case with this remarkable manuscript, time and the work of modern scientists have come out in support of what seem like the most ludicrous of tall tales. For example, arguably his most unreal description of an animal is that of the legendary great auk (or rukh) of Madagascar, which has a wingspan of some 40 yards and can lift an elephant. Pure fantasy? Well, for hundreds of years this particular yarn certainly did Marco’s reputation little good. Yet early in the twentieth century in the jungles of Madagascar ornithologists found fossilised eggs the size of footballs of a gigantic extinct bird.