XLVIII. CONCERNING THE PROVINCE OF CARAJAN…

XLVIII. CONCERNING THE PROVINCE OF CARAJAN

When you have passed that River you enter on the province of CARAJAN, which is so large that it includes seven kingdoms. It lies towards the west; the people are Idolaters, and they are subject to the Great Kaan. A son of his, however, is there as King of the country, by name ESSENTIMUR; a very great and rich and puissant Prince; and he well and justly rules his dominion, for he is a wise man, and a valiant.

After leaving the river that I spoke of, you go five days’ journey towards the west, meeting with numerous towns and villages. The country is one in which excellent horses are bred, and the people live by cattle and agriculture. They have a language of their own which is passing hard to understand. At the end of those five days’ journey you come to the capital, which is called YACHI, a very great and noble city, in which are numerous merchants and craftsmen.{1}

The people are of sundry kinds, for there are not only Saracens and Idolaters, but also a few Nestorian Christians.{2} They have wheat and rice in plenty. Howbeit they never eat wheaten bread, because in that country it is unwholesome.{3} Rice they eat, and make of it sundry messes, besides a kind of drink which is very clear and good, and makes a man drunk just as wine does.

Their money is such as I will tell you. They use for the purpose certain white porcelain shells that are found in the sea, such as are sometimes put on dogs’ collars; and 80 of these porcelain shells pass for a single weight of silver, equivalent to two Venice groats, i.e. 24 piccoli. Also eight such weights of silver count equal to one such weight of gold.{4}

They have brine-wells in this country from which they make salt, and all the people of those parts make a living by this salt. The King, too, I can assure you, gets a great revenue from this salt.{5}

There is a lake in this country of a good hundred miles in compass, in which are found great quantities of the best fish in the world; fish of great size, and of all sorts.

They reckon it no matter for a man to have intimacy with another’s wife, provided the woman be willing.

Let me tell you also that the people of that country eat their meat raw, whether it be of mutton, beef, buffalo, poultry, or any other kind. Thus the poor people will go to the shambles, and take the raw liver as it comes from the carcase and cut it small, and put it in a sauce of garlic and spices, and so eat it; and other meat in like manner, raw, just as we eat meat that is dressed.{6}

Now I will tell you about a further part of the Province of Carajan, of which I have been speaking.

NOTE 1.—We have now arrived at the great province of CARAJAN, the KARÁJÁNG of the Mongols, which we know to be YUN-NAN, and at its capital YACHI, which—I was about to add—we know to be YUN-NAN-FU. But I find all the commentators make it something else. Rashiduddin, however, in his detail of the twelve Sings or provincial governments of China under the Mongols, thus speaks: “10th, KARÁJÁNG. This used to be an independent kingdom, and the Sing is established at the great city of YÁCHI. All the inhabitants are Mahomedans. The chiefs are Noyan Takin, and Yaḳub Beg, son of ’Ali Beg, the Belúch.” And turning to Pauthier’s corrected account of the same distribution of the empire from authentic Chinese sources (p. 334), we find: “8. The administrative province of Yun-nan.... Its capital, chief town also of the canton of the same name, was called Chung-khing, now YUN-NAN-FU.” Hence Yachi was Yun-nan-fu. This is still a large city, having a rectangular rampart with 6 gates, and a circuit of about 6½ miles. The suburbs were destroyed by the Mahomedan rebels. The most important trade there now is in the metallic produce of the Province. [According to Oxenham, Historical Atlas, there were ten provinces or sheng (Liao-yang, Chung-shu, Shen-si, Ho-nan, Sze-ch’wan, Yun-nan, Hu-kwang, Kiang-che, Kiang-si and Kan-suh) and twelve military governorships.—H. C.]

Yachi was perhaps an ancient corruption of the name Yichau, which the territory bore (according to Martini and Biot) under the Han; but more probably Yichau was a Chinese transformation of the real name Yachi. The Shans still call the city Muang Chi, which is perhaps another modification of the same name.

We have thus got Ch’êng-tu fu as one fixed point, and Yun-nan-fu as another, and we have to track the traveller’s itinerary between the two, through what Ritter called with reason a terra incognita. What little was known till recently of this region came from the Catholic missionaries. Of late the veil has begun to be lifted; the daring excursion of Francis Garnier and his party in 1868 intersected the tract towards the south; Mr. T. T. Cooper crossed it further north, by Ta-t’sien lu, Lithang and Bathang; Baron v. Richthofen in 1872 had penetrated several marches towards the heart of the mystery, when an unfortunate mishap compelled his return, but he brought back with him much precious information.

Five days forward from Ch’êng-tu fu brought us on Tibetan ground. Five days backward from Yun-nan fu should bring us to the river Brius, with its gold-dust and the frontier of Caindu. Wanting a local scale for a distance of five days, I find that our next point in advance, Marco’s city of Carajan undisputably Tali-fu, is said by him to be ten days from Yachi. The direct distance between the cities of Yun-nan and Ta-li I find by measurement on Keith Johnston’s map to be 133 Italian miles. [The distance by road is 215 English miles. (See Baber, p. 191.)—H. C.] Taking half this as radius, the compasses swept from Yun-nan-fu as centre, intersect near its most southerly elbow the great upper branch of the Kiang, the Kin-sha Kiang of the Chinese, or “River of the Golden Sands,” the MURUS USSU and BRICHU of the Mongols and Tibetans, and manifestly the auriferous BRIUS of our traveller.[1] Hence also the country north of this elbow is CAINDU.

I leave the preceding paragraph as it stood in the first edition, because it shows how near the true position of Caindu these unaided deductions from our author’s data had carried me. That paragraph was followed by an erroneous hypothesis as to the intermediate part of that journey, but, thanks to the new light shed by Baron Richthofen, we are enabled now to lay down the whole itinerary from Ch’êng-tu fu to Yun-nan fu with confidence in its accuracy.

The Kin-sha Kiang or Upper course of the Great Yang-tzŭ, descending from Tibet to Yun-nan, forms the great bight or elbow to which allusion has just been made, and which has been a feature known to geographers ever since the publication of D’Anville’s atlas. The tract enclosed in this elbow is cut in two by another great Tibetan River, the Yarlung, or Yalung-Kiang, which joins the Kin-sha not far from the middle of the great bight; and this Yalung, just before the confluence, receives on the left a stream of inferior calibre, the Ngan-ning Ho, which also flows in a valley parallel to the meridian, like all that singular fascis of great rivers between Assam and Sze-ch’wan.

This River Ngan-ning waters a valley called Kien-ch’ang, containing near its northern end a city known by the same name, but in our modern maps marked as Ning-yuan fu; this last being the name of a department of which it is the capital, and which embraces much more than the valley of Kien-ch’ang. The town appears, however, as Kien-ch’ang in the Atlas Sinensis of Martini, and as Kienchang-ouei in D’Anville. This remarkable valley, imbedded as it were in a wilderness of rugged highlands and wild races, accessible only by two or three long and difficult routes, rejoices in a warm climate, a most productive soil, scenery that seems to excite enthusiasm even in Chinamen, and a population noted for amiable temper. Towns and villages are numerous. The people are said to be descended from Chinese immigrants, but their features have little of the Chinese type, and they have probably a large infusion of aboriginal blood. [Kien-ch’ang, “otherwise the Prefecture of Ning-yuan, is perhaps the least known of the Eighteen Provinces,” writes Mr. Baber. (Travels, p. 58.) “Two or three sentences in the book of Ser Marco, to the effect that after crossing high mountains, he reached a fertile country containing many towns and villages, and inhabited by a very immoral population, constitute to this day the only description we possess of Cain-du, as he calls the district.” Baber adds (p. 82): “Although the main valley of Kien-ch’ang is now principally inhabited by Chinese, yet the Sifan or Menia people are frequently met with, and most of the villages possess two names, one Chinese, and the other indigenous. Probably in Marco Polo’s time a Menia population predominated, and the valley was regarded as part of Menia. If Marco had heard that name, he would certainly have recorded it; but it is not one which is likely to reach the ears of a stranger. The Chinese people and officials never employ it, but use in its stead an alternative name, Chan-tu or Chan-tui, of precisely the same application, which I make bold to offer as the original of Marco’s Caindu, or preferably Ciandu.”—H. C.]

This valley is bounded on the east by the mountain country of the Lolos, which extends north nearly to Yachau (supra, pp. 45, 48, 60), and which, owing to the fierce intractable character of the race, forms throughout its whole length an impenetrable barrier between East and West. [The Rev. Gray Owen, of Ch’êng-tu, wrote (Jour. China B. R. A. S. xxviii. 1893–1894, p. 59): “The only great trade route infested by brigands is that from Ya-chau to Ning-yuan fu, where Lo-lo brigands are numerous, especially in the autumn. Last year I heard of a convoy of 18 mules with Shen-si goods on the above-mentioned road captured by these brigands, muleteers and all taken inside the Lo-lo country. It is very seldom that captives get out of Lo-lo-dom, because the ransom asked is too high, and the Chinese officials are not gallant enough to buy out their unfortunate countrymen. The Lo-los hold thousands of Chinese in slavery; and more are added yearly to the number.”—H. C.] Two routes run from Ch’êng-tu fu to Yun-nan; these fork at Ya-chau and thenceforward are entirely separated by this barrier. To the east of it is the route which descends the Min River to Siu-chau, and then passes by Chao-tong and Tong-chuan to Yun-nan fu: to the west of the barrier is a route leading through Kien-ch’ang to Ta-li fu, but throwing off a branch from Ning-yuan southward in the direction of Yun-nan fu.

This road from Ch’êng-tu fu to Ta-li by Ya-chau and Ning-yuan appears to be that by which the greater part of the goods for Bhamó and Ava used to travel before the recent Mahomedan rebellion; it is almost certainly the road by which Kúblái, in 1253, during the reign of his brother Mangku Kaan, advanced to the conquest of Ta-li, then the head of an independent kingdom in Western Yun-nan. As far as Ts’ing-k’i hien, 3 marches beyond Ya-chau, this route coincides with the great Tibet road by Ta-t’sien lu and Bathang to L’hása, and then it diverges to the left.

We may now say without hesitation that by this road Marco travelled. His Tibet commences with the mountain region near Ya-chau; his 20 days’ journey through a devastated and dispeopled tract is the journey to Ning-yuan fu. Even now, from Ts’ing-k’i onwards for several days, not a single inhabited place is seen. The official route from Ya-chau to Ning-yuan lays down 13 stages, but it generally takes from 15 to 18 days. Polo, whose journeys seem often to have been shorter than the modern average,[2] took 20. On descending from the highlands he comes once more into a populated region, and enters the charming Valley of Kien-ch’ang. This valley, with its capital near the upper extremity, its numerous towns and villages, its cassia, its spiced wine, and its termination southward on the River of the Golden Sands, is CAINDU. The traveller’s road from Ningyuan to Yunnanfu probably lay through Hwei-li, and the Kin-sha Kiang would be crossed as already indicated, near its most southerly bend, and almost due north of Yun-nan fu. (See Richthofen as quoted at pp. 45–46.)

As regards the name of CAINDU or GHEINDU (as in G. T.), I think we may safely recognise in the last syllable the do which is so frequent a termination of Tibetan names (Amdo, Tsiamdo, etc.); whilst the Cain, as Baron Richthofen has pointed out, probably survives in the first part of the name _Kien_chang.

[Baber writes (pp. 80–81): “Colonel Yule sees in the word Caindu a variation of ‘Chien-ch’ang,’ and supposes the syllable ‘du’ to be the same as the termination ‘du,’ ‘do,’ or ‘tu,’ so frequent in Tibetan names. In such names, however, ‘do’ never means a district, but always a confluence, or a town near a confluence, as might almost be guessed from a map of Tibet.... Unsatisfied with Colonel Yule’s identification, I cast about for another, and thought for a while that a clue had been found in the term ‘Chien-t’ou’ (sharp-head), applied to certain Lolo tribes. But the idea had to be abandoned, since Marco Polo’s anecdote about the ‘caitiff,’ and the loose manners of his family, could never have referred to the Lolos, who are admitted even by their Chinese enemies to possess a very strict code indeed of domestic regulations. The Lolos being eliminated, the Si-fans remained; and before we had been many days in their neighbourhood, stories were told us of their conduct which a polite pen refuses to record. It is enough to say that Marco’s account falls rather short of the truth, and most obviously applies to the Si-fan.”

Devéria (Front. p. 146 note) says that Kien-ch’ang is the ancient territory of Kiung-tu which, under the Han Dynasty, fell into the hands of the Tibetans, and was made by the Mongols the march of Kien-ch’ang (Che-Kong-t’u); it is the Caindu of Marco Polo; under the Han Dynasty it was the Kiun or division of Yueh-sui or Yueh-hsi. Devéria quotes from the Yuen-shi-lei pien the following passage relating to the year 1284: “The twelve tribes of the Barbarians to the south-west of Kien-tou and Kin-Chi submitted; Kien-tou was administered by Mien (Burma); Kien-tou submits because the Kingdom of Mien has been vanquished.” Kien-tou is the Chien-t’ou of Baber, the Caindu of Marco Polo. (Mélanges de Harlez, p. 97.) According to Mr. E. H. Parker (China Review, xix. p. 69), Yueh-hsi or Yueh-sui “is the modern Kien-ch’ang Valley, the Caindu of Marco Polo, between the Yalung and Yang-tzŭ Rivers; the only non-Chinese races found there now are the Si-fan and Lolos.”—H. C.]

Turning to minor particulars, the Lake of Caindu in which the pearls were found is doubtless one lying near Ning-yuan, whose beauty Richthofen heard greatly extolled, though nothing of the pearls. [Mr. Hosie writes (Three Years, 112–113): “If the former tradition be true (the old city of Ning-yuan having given place to a large lake in the early years of the Ming Dynasty), the lake had no existence when Marco Polo passed through Caindu, and yet we find him mentioning a lake in the country in which pearls were found. Curiously enough, although I had not then read the Venetian’s narrative, one of the many things told me regarding the lake was that pearls are found in it, and specimens were brought to me for inspection.” The lake lies to the south-east of the present city.—H. C.] A small lake is marked by D’Anville, close to Kien-ch’ang, under the name of Gechoui-tang. The large quantities of gold derived from the Kin-sha Kiang, and the abundance of musk in that vicinity, are testified to by Martini. The Lake mentioned by Polo as existing in the territory of Yachi is no doubt the Tien-chi, the Great Lake on the shore of which the city of Yun-nan stands, and from which boats make their way by canals along the walls and streets. Its circumference, according to Martini, is 500 li. The cut (p. 68), from Garnier, shows this lake as seen from a villa on its banks. [Devéria (p. 129) quotes this passage from the Yuen-shi-lei pien: “Yachi, of which the U-man or Black Barbarians made their capital, is surrounded by Lake Tien-chi on three sides.” Tien-chi is one of the names of Lake Kwen-ming, on the shore of which is built Yun-nan fu.—H. C.]

Returning now to the Karájang of the Mongols, or Carajan, as Polo writes it, we shall find that the latter distinguishes this great province, which formerly, he says, included seven kingdoms, into two Mongol Governments, the seat of one being at Yachi, which we have seen to be Yun-nan fu, and that of the other at a city to which he gives the name of the Province, and which we shall find to be the existing Ta-li fu. Great confusion has been created in most of the editions by a distinction in the form of the name as applied to these two governments. Thus Ramusio prints the province under Yachi as Carajan, and that under Ta-li as Carazan, whilst Marsden, following out his system for the conversion of Ramusio’s orthography, makes the former Karaian and the latter Karazan. Pauthier prints Caraian all through, a fact so far valuable as showing that his texts make no distinction between the names of the two governments, but the form impedes the recognition of the old Mongol nomenclature. I have no doubt that the name all through should be read Carajan, and on this I have acted. In the Geog. Text we find the name given at the end of ch. xlvii. Caragian, in ch. xlviii. as Carajan, in ch. xlix. as Caraian, thus just reversing the distinction made by Marsden. The Crusca has Charagia(n) all through.

The name then was Ḳará-jáng, in which the first element was the Mongol or Turki Ḳárá, “Black.” For we find in another passage of Rashid the following information:[3]—“To the south-west of Cathay is the country called by the Chinese Dailiu or ‘Great Realm,’ and by the Mongols Ḳarájáng, in the language of India and Kashmir Ḳandar, and by us Ḳandahár. This country, which is of vast extent, is bounded on one side by Tibet and Tangut, and on others by Mongolia, Cathay, and the country of the Gold-Teeth. The King of Ḳarajang uses the title of Mahárá, i.e. Great King. The capital is called Yachi, and there the Council of Administration is established. Among the inhabitants of this country some are black, and others are white; these latter are called by the Mongols Chaghán-Jáng (‘White Jang’).” Jang has not been explained; but probably it may have been a Tibetan term adopted by the Mongols, and the colours may have applied to their clothing. The dominant race at the Mongol invasion seems to have been Shans;[4] and black jackets are the characteristic dress of the Shans whom one sees in Burma in modern times. The Kara-jang and Chaghan-jang appear to correspond also to the U-man and Pe-man, or Black Barbarians and White Barbarians, who are mentioned by Chinese authorities as conquered by the Mongols. It would seem from one of Pauthier’s Chinese quotations (p. 388), that the Chaghan-jang were found in the vicinity of Li-kiang fu. (D’Ohsson, II. 317; J. R. Geog. Soc. III. 294.) [Dr. Bretschneider (Med. Res. I. p. 184) says that in the description of Yun-nan, in the Yuen-shi, “Cara-jang and Chagan-jang are rendered by Wu-man and Po-man (Black and White Barbarians). But in the biographies of Djao-a-k’o-p’an, A-r-szelan (Yuen-shi, ch. cxxiii.), and others, these tribes are mentioned under the names of Ha-la-djang and Ch’a-han-djang, as the Mongols used to call them; and in the biography of Wu-liang-ho t’ai, [Uriang kadai], the conqueror of Yun-nan, it is stated that the capital of the Black Barbarians was called Yach’i. It is described there as a city surrounded by lakes from three sides.”—H. C.]

Regarding Rashiduddin’s application of the name Ḳandahár or Gandhára to Yun-nan, and curious points connected therewith, I must refer to a paper of mine in the J. R. A. Society (N.S. IV. 356). But I may mention that in the ecclesiastical translation of the classical localities of Indian Buddhism to Indo-China, which is current in Burma, Yun-nan represents Gandhára,[5] and is still so styled in state documents (Gandálarít).

What has been said of the supposed name Caraian disposes, I trust, of the fancies which have connected the origin of the Karens of Burma with it. More groundless still is M. Pauthier’s deduction of the Talains of Pegu (as the Burmese call them) from the people of Ta-li, who fled from Kúblái’s invasion.

NOTE 2.—The existence of Nestorians in this remote province is very notable [see Bonin, J. As. XV. 1900, pp. 589–590.—H. C.]; and also the early prevalence of Mahomedanism, which Rashiduddin intimates in stronger terms. “All the inhabitants of Yachi,” he says, “are Mahomedans.” This was no doubt an exaggeration, but the Mahomedans seem always to have continued to be an important body in Yun-nan up to our own day. In 1855 began their revolt against the imperial authority, which for a time resulted in the establishment of their independence in Western Yun-nan under a chief whom they called Sultan Suleiman. A proclamation in remarkably good Arabic, announcing the inauguration of his reign, appears to have been circulated to Mahomedans in foreign states, and a copy of it some years ago found its way through the Nepalese agent at L’hasa, into the hands of Colonel Ramsay, the British Resident at Katmandu.[6]

NOTE 3.—Wheat grows as low as Ava, but there also it is not used by natives for bread, only for confectionery and the like. The same is the case in Eastern China. (See ch. xxvi. note 4, and Middle Kingdom, II. 43.)

NOTE 4.—The word piccoli is supplied, doubtfully, in lieu of an unknown symbol. If correct, then we should read “24 piccoli each,” for this was about the equivalent of a grosso. This is the first time Polo mentions cowries, which he calls porcellani. This might have been rendered by the corresponding vernacular name “Pig-shells,” applied to certain shells of that genus (Cypraea) in some parts of England. It is worthy of note that as the name porcellana has been transferred from these shells to China-ware, so the word pig has been in Scotland applied to crockery; whether the process has been analogous, I cannot say.

Klaproth states that Yun-nan is the only country of China in which cowries had continued in use, though in ancient times they were more generally diffused. According to him 80 cowries were equivalent to 6 cash, or a half-penny. About 1780 in Eastern Bengal 80 cowries were worth ⅜th of a penny, and some 40 years ago, when Prinsep compiled his tables in Calcutta (where cowries were still in use a few years ago, if they are not now), 80 cowries were worth ³⁄₁₀ of a penny.

At the time of the Mahomedan conquest of Bengal, early in the 13th century, they found the currency exclusively composed of cowries, aided perhaps by bullion in large transactions, but with no coined money. In remote districts this continued to modern times. When the Hon. Robert Lindsay went as Resident and Collector to Silhet about 1778, cowries constituted nearly the whole currency of the Province. The yearly revenue amounted to 250,000 rupees, and this was entirely paid in cowries at the rate of 5120 to the rupee. It required large warehouses to contain them, and when the year’s collection was complete a large fleet of boats to transport them to Dacca. Before Lindsay’s time it had been the custom to count the whole before embarking them! Down to 1801 the Silhet revenue was entirely collected in cowries, but by 1813, the whole was realised in specie. (Thomas, in J. R. A. S. N.S. II. 147; Lives of the Lindsays, III. 169, 170.)

Klaproth’s statement has ceased to be correct. Lieutenant Garnier found cowries nowhere in use north of Luang Prabang; and among the Kakhyens in Western Yun-nan these shells are used only for ornament. [However, Mr. E. H. Parker says (China Review, XXVI. p. 106) that the porcelain money still circulates in the Shan States, and that he saw it there himself.—H. C.]

NOTE 5.—See ch. xlvii. note 4. Martini speaks of a great brine-well to the N.E. of Yaogan (W.N.W. of the city of Yun-nan), which supplied the whole country round.

NOTE 6.—Two particulars appearing in these latter paragraphs are alluded to by Rashiduddin in giving a brief account of the overland route from India to China, which is unfortunately very obscure: “Thence you arrive at the borders of Tibet, where they eat raw meat and worship images, and have no shame respecting their wives.” (Elliot, I. p. 73.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] [Baber writes (p. 107): “The river is never called locally by any other name than Kin-ho, or ‘Gold River.’[A] The term Kin-sha-Kiang should in strictness be confined to the Tibetan course of the stream; as applied to other parts it is a mere book name. There is no great objection to its adoption, except that it is unintelligible to the inhabitants of the banks, and is liable to mislead travellers in search of indigenous information, but at any rate it should not be supposed to asperse Marco Polo’s accuracy. Gold River is the local name from the junction of the Yalung to about P’ing-shan; below P’ing-shan it is known by various designations, but the Ssu-ch’uanese naturally call it ‘the River,’ or, by contrast with its affluents, the ‘Big River’ (Ta-ho).” I imagine that Baber here makes a slight mistake, and that they use the name kiang, and not ho, for the river.—H. C.]

[Mr. Rockhill remarks (Land of the Lamas, p. 196 note) that “Marco Polo speaks of the Yang-tzŭ as the Brius, and Orazio della Penna calls it Biciu, both words representing the Tibetan Dré ch’u. This last name has been frequently translated ‘Cow yak River,’ but this is certainly not its meaning, as cow yak is dri-mo, never pronounced dré, and unintelligible without the suffix, mo. Dré may mean either mule, dirty, or rice, but as I have never seen the word written, I cannot decide on any of these terms, all of which have exactly the same pronunciation. The Mongols call it Murus osu, and in books this is sometimes changed to Murui osu, ‘Tortuous river.’ The Chinese call it Tung t’ien ho, ‘River of all Heaven.’ The name Kin-sha kiang, ‘River of Golden Sand,’ is used for it from Bat’ang to Sui-fu, or thereabouts.” The general name for the river is Ta-Kiang (Great River), or simply Kiang, in contradistinction to Ho, for Hwang-Ho (Yellow River) in Northern China.—H. C.]

[2] Baron Richthofen, who has travelled hundreds of miles in his footsteps, considers his allowance of time to be generally from ¼ to ⅓ greater than that now usual.

[3] See Quatremère’s Rashiduddin, pp. lxxxvi.–xcvi. My quotation is made up from two citations by Quatremère, one from his text of Rashiduddin, and the other from the History of Benaketi, which Quatremère shows to have been drawn from Rashiduddin, whilst it contains some particulars not existing in his own text of that author.

[4] The title Chao in Nan-Chao (infra, p. 79) is said by a Chinese author (Pauthier, p. 391) to signify King in the language of those barbarians. This is evidently the Chao which forms an essential part of the title of all Siamese and Shan princes.

[Regarding the word Nan-Chao, Mr. Parker (China Review, XX. p. 339) writes “In the barbarian tongue ‘prince’ is Chao,” says the Chinese author; and there were six Chao, of which the Nan or Southern was the leading power. Hence the name Nan-Chao ... it is hardly necessary for me to say that chao or kyiao is still the Shan-Siamese word for ‘prince.’” Pallegoix (Dict. p. 85) has Chào, Princeps, rex.—H. C.]

[5] Gandhára, Arabicé Ḳandahár, is properly the country about Peshawar, Gandaritis of Strabo.Return to passage

[6] This is printed almost in full in the French Voyage d’Exploration, I. 564.Return to passage

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [A] Marco Polo nowhere calls the river “Gold River,” the name he gives it is Brius.—H. Y.

XLIX. CONCERNING A FURTHER PART OF THE PROVINCE OF CARAJAN

After leaving that city of Yachi of which I have been speaking, and travelling ten days towards the west, you come to another capital city which is still in the province of Carajan, and is itself called Carajan. The people are Idolaters and subject to the Great Kaan; and the King is COGACHIN, who is a son of the Great Kaan.{1}

In this country gold-dust is found in great quantities; that is to say in the rivers and lakes, whilst in the mountains gold is also found in pieces of larger size. Gold is indeed so abundant that they give one saggio of gold for only six of the same weight in silver. And for small change they use porcelain shells as I mentioned before. These are not found in the country, however, but are brought from India.{2}

In this province are found snakes and great serpents of such vast size as to strike fear into those who see them, and so hideous that the very account of them must excite the wonder of those to hear it. I will tell you how long and big they are.

You may be assured that some of them are ten paces in length; some are more and some less. And in bulk they are equal to a great cask, for the bigger ones are about ten palms in girth. They have two forelegs near the head, but for foot nothing but a claw like the claw of a hawk or that of a lion. The head is very big, and the eyes are bigger than a great loaf of bread. The mouth is large enough to swallow a man whole, and is garnished with great [pointed] teeth. And in short they are so fierce-looking and so hideously ugly, that every man and beast must stand in fear and trembling of them. There are also smaller ones, such as of eight paces long, and of five, and of one pace only.

The way in which they are caught is this. You must know that by day they live underground because of the great heat, and in the night they go out to feed, and devour every animal they can catch. They go also to drink at the rivers and lakes and springs. And their weight is so great that when they travel in search of food or drink, as they do by night, the tail makes a great furrow in the soil as if a full ton of liquor had been dragged along. Now the huntsmen who go after them take them by certain gyn which they set in the track over which the serpent has past, knowing that the beast will come back the same way. They plant a stake deep in the ground and fix on the head of this a sharp blade of steel made like a razor or a lance-point, and then they cover the whole with sand so that the serpent cannot see it. Indeed the huntsman plants several such stakes and blades on the track. On coming to the spot the beast strikes against the iron blade with such force that it enters his breast and rives him up to the navel, so that he dies on the spot [and the crows on seeing the brute dead begin to caw, and then the huntsmen know that the serpent is dead and come in search of him].

This then is the way these beasts are taken. Those who take them proceed to extract the gall from the inside, and this sells at a great price; for you must know it furnishes the material for a most precious medicine. Thus if a person is bitten by a mad dog, and they give him but a small pennyweight of this medicine to drink, he is cured in a moment. Again if a woman is hard in labour they give her just such another dose and she is delivered at once. Yet again if one has any disease like the itch, or it may be worse, and applies a small quantity of this gall he shall speedily be cured. So you see why it sells at such a high price.

They also sell the flesh of this serpent, for it is excellent eating, and the people are very fond of it. And when these serpents are very hungry, sometimes they will seek out the lairs of lions or bears or other large wild beasts, and devour their cubs, without the sire and dam being able to prevent it. Indeed if they catch the big ones themselves they devour them too; they can make no resistance.{3}

In this province also are bred large and excellent horses which are taken to India for sale. And you must know that the people dock two or three joints of the tail from their horses, to prevent them from flipping their riders, a thing which they consider very unseemly. They ride long like Frenchmen, and wear armour of boiled leather, and carry spears and shields and arblasts, and all their quarrels are poisoned.{4} [And I was told as a fact that many persons, especially those meditating mischief, constantly carry this poison about with them, so that if by any chance they should be taken, and be threatened with torture, to avoid this they swallow the poison and so die speedily. But princes who are aware of this keep ready dog’s dung, which they cause the criminal instantly to swallow, to make him vomit the poison. And thus they manage to cure those scoundrels.]

I will tell you of a wicked thing they used to do before the Great Kaan conquered them. If it chanced that a man of fine person or noble birth, or some other quality that recommended him, came to lodge with those people, then they would murder him by poison, or otherwise. And this they did, not for the sake of plunder, but because they believed that in this way the goodly favour and wisdom and repute of the murdered man would cleave to the house where he was slain. And in this manner many were murdered before the country was conquered by the Great Kaan. But since his conquest, some 35 years ago, these crimes and this evil practice have prevailed no more; and this through dread of the Great Kaan who will not permit such things.{5}

NOTE 1.—There can be no doubt that this second chief city of Carajan is TALI-FU, which was the capital of the Shan Kingdom called by the Chinese Nan-Chao. This kingdom had subsisted in Yun-nan since 738, and probably had embraced the upper part of the Irawadi Valley. For the Chinese tell us it was also called Maung, and it probably was identical with the Shan Kingdom of Muang Maorong or of Pong, of which Captain Pemberton procured a Chronicle. [In A.D. 650, the Ai-Lao, the most ancient name by which the Shans were known to the Chinese, became the Nan-Chao. The Mêng family ruled the country from the 7th century; towards the middle of the 8th century, P’i-lo-ko, who is the real founder of the Thai kingdom of Nan-Chao, received from the Chinese the title of King of Yun-Nan and made T’ai-ho, 15 lis south of Ta-li, his residence; he died in 748. In A.D. 938, Twan Sze-ying, of an old Chinese family, took Ta-li and established there an independent kingdom. In 1115 embassies with China were exchanged, and the Emperor conferred (1119) upon Twan Ch’êng-yn the title of King of Ta-li (Ta-li Kwo Wang). Twan Siang-hing was the last king of Ta-li (1239–1251). In 1252 the Kingdom of Nan-Chao was destroyed by the Mongols; the Emperor She Tsu (Kúblái) gave the title of Maháraja (Mo-ho Lo-tso) to Twan Hing-che (son of Twan Siang-hing), who had fled to Yun-Nan fu and was captured there. Afterwards (1261) the Twan are known as the eleven Tsung-Kwan (governors); the last of them, Twan Ming, was made a prisoner by an army sent by the Ming Emperors, and sent to Nan-King (1381). (E. H. Parker, Early Laos and China, China Review, XIX. and the Old Thai or Shan Empire of Western Yun-Nan, Ibid., XX.; E. Rocher, Hist. des Princes du Yunnan, T’oung Pao, 1899; E. Chavannes, Une Inscription du roy. de Nan Tchao, J.A., November–December, 1900; M. Tchang, Tableau des Souverains de Nan-Tchao, Bul. Ecole Franç. d’Ext. Orient, I. No. 4.)—H. C.] The city of Ta-li was taken by Kúblái in 1253–1254. The circumstance that it was known to the invaders (as appeals from Polo’s statement) by the name of the province is an indication of the fact that it was the capital of Carajan before the conquest. [“That Yachi and Carajan represent Yünnan-fu and Tali, is proved by topographical and other evidence of an overwhelming nature. I venture to add one more proof, which seems to have been overlooked.

“If there is a natural feature which must strike any visitor to those two cities, it is that they both lie on the shore of notable lakes, of so large an extent as to be locally called seas; and for the comparison, it should be remembered that the inhabitants of the Yünnan province have easy access to the ocean by the Red River, or Sung Ka. Now, although Marco does not circumstantially specify the fact of these cities lying on large bodies of water, yet in both cases, two or three sentences further on, will be found mention of lakes; in the case of Yachi, ‘a lake of a good hundred miles in compass’—by no means an unreasonable estimate.

“Tali-fu is renowned as the strongest hold of Western Yünnan, and it certainly must have been impregnable to bow and spear. From the western margin of its majestic lake, which lies approximately north and south, rises a sloping plain of about three miles average breadth, closed in by the huge wall of the Tien-tsang Mountains. In the midst of this plain stands the city, the lake at its feet, the snowy summits at its back. On either flank, at about twelve and six miles distance respectively, are situated Shang-Kuan and Hsia-Kuan (upper and lower passes), two strongly fortified towns guarding the confined strip between mountain and lake; for the plain narrows at the two extremities, and is intersected by a river at both points.” (Baber, Travels, 155.)—H. C.]

The distance from Yachi to this city of Karajang is ten days, and this corresponds well with the distance from Yun-nan fu to Tali-fu. For we find that, of the three Burmese Embassies whose itineraries are given by Burney, one makes 7 marches between those cities, specifying 2 of them as double marches, therefore equal to 9, whilst the other two make 11 marches; Richthofen’s information gives 12. Ta-li-fu is a small old city overlooking its large lake (about 24 miles long by 6 wide), and an extensive plain devoid of trees. Lofty mountains rise on the south side of the city. The Lake appears to communicate with the Mekong, and the story goes, no doubt fabulous, that boats have come up to Ta-li from the Ocean. [Captain Gill (II. pp. 299–300) writes: “Ta-li fu is an ancient city ... it is the Carajan of Marco Polo.... Marco’s description of the lake of Yun-Nan may be perfectly well applied to the Lake of Ta-li.... The fish were particularly commended to our notice, though we were told that there were no oysters in this lake, as there are said to be in that of Yun-Nan; if the latter statement be true, it would illustrate Polo’s account of another lake somewhere in these regions in which are found pearls (which are white but not round).”—H. C.]

Ta-li fu was recently the capital of Sultan Suleiman [Tu Wen-siu]. It was reached by Lieutenant Garnier in a daring détour by the north of Yun-nan, but his party were obliged to leave in haste on the second day after their arrival. The city was captured by the Imperial officers in 1873, when a horrid massacre of the Mussulmans took place [19th January]. The Sultan took poison, but his head was cut off and sent to Peking. Momein fell soon after [10th June], and the Panthé kingdom is ended.

We see that Polo says the King ruling for Kúblái at this city was a son of the Kaan, called COGACHIN, whilst he told us in the last chapter that the King reigning at Yachi was also a son of the Kaan, called ESSENTIMUR. It is probably a mere lapsus or error of dictation calling the latter a son of the Kaan, for in ch. li. infra, this prince is correctly described as the Kaan’s grandson. Rashiduddin tells us that Kúblái had given his son HUKÁJI (or perhaps Hogáchi, i.e. Cogachin) the government of Karajang,[1] and that after the death of this Prince the government was continued to his son ISENTIMUR. Klaproth gives the date of the latter’s nomination from the Chinese Annals as 1280. It is not easy to reconcile Marco’s statements perfectly with a knowledge of these facts; but we may suppose that, in speaking of Cogachin as ruling at Karajang (or Tali-fu) and Esentimur at Yachi, he describes things as they stood when his visit occurred, whilst in the second reference to “Sentemur’s” being King in the province and his father dead, he speaks from later knowledge. This interpretation would confirm what has been already deduced from other circumstances, that his visit to Yun-nan was prior to 1280. (Pemberton’s Report on the Eastern Frontier, 108 seqq.; Quat. Rashid. pp. lxxxix-xc.; Journ. Asiat. sér. II. vol. i.)

NOTE 2.—[Captain Gill writes (II. p. 302): “There are said to be very rich gold and silver mines within a few days’ journey of the city” (of Ta-li). Dr. Anderson says (Mandalay to Momien, p. 203): “Gold is brought to Momein from Yonephin and Sherg-wan villages, fifteen days’ march to the north-east; but no information could be obtained as to the quantity found. It is also brought in leaf, which is sent to Burma, where it is in extensive demand.”—H. C.]

NOTE 3.—It cannot be doubted that Marco’s serpents here are crocodiles, in spite of his strange mistakes about their having only two feet and one claw on each, and his imperfect knowledge of their aquatic habits. He may have seen only a mutilated specimen. But there is no mistaking the hideous ferocity of the countenance, and the “eyes bigger than a fourpenny loaf,” as Ramusio has it. Though the actual eye of the crocodile does not bear this comparison, the prominent orbits do, especially in the case of the Ghaṛiyál of the Ganges, and form one of the most repulsive features of the reptile’s physiognomy. In fact, its presence on the surface of an Indian river is often recognisable only by three dark knobs rising above the surface, viz. the snout and the two orbits. And there is some foundation for what our author says of the animal’s habits, for the crocodile does sometimes frequent holes at a distance from water, of which a striking instance is within my own recollection (in which the deep furrowed track also was a notable circumstance).

The Cochin Chinese are very fond of crocodile’s flesh, and there is or was a regular export of this dainty for their use from Kamboja. I have known it eaten by certain classes in India. (J. R. G. S. XXX. 193.)

The term serpent is applied by many old writers to crocodiles and the like, e.g. by Odoric, and perhaps allusively by Shakspeare (“Where’s my Serpent of Old Nile?”). Mr. Fergusson tells me he was once much struck with the snake-like motion of a group of crocodiles hastily descending to the water from a high sand-bank, without apparent use of the limbs, when surprised by the approach of a boat.[2]

Matthioli says the gall of the crocodile surpasses all medicines for the removal of pustules and the like from the eyes. Vincent of Beauvais mentions the same, besides many other medical uses of the reptile’s carcass, including a very unsavoury cosmetic. (Matt. p. 245; Spec. Natur. Lib. XVII. c. 106, 108.)

[“According to Chinese notions, Han Yü, the St. Patrick of China, having persuaded the alligators in China that he was all-powerful, induced the stupid saurians to migrate to Ngo Hu or ‘Alligators’ Lake’ in the Kwang-tung province.” (North-China Herald, 5th July, 1895, p. 5.)

Alligators have been found in 1878 at Wu-hu and at Chen-kiang (Ngan-hwei and Kiang-Su). (See A. A. Fauvel, Alligators in China, in Jour. N. China B. R. A. S. XIII. 1879, 1–36.)—H. C.]

NOTE 4.—I think the great horses must be an error, though running through all the texts, and that grant quantité de chevaus was probably intended. Valuable ponies are produced in those regions, but I have never heard of large horses, and Martini’s testimony is to like effect (p. 141). Nor can I hear of any race in those regions in modern times that uses what we should call long stirrups. It is true that the Tartars rode very short—“brevissimas habent strepas,” as Carpini says (643); and the Kirghiz Kazaks now do the same. Both Burmese and Shans ride what we should call short; and Major Sladen observes of the people on the western border of Yun-nan: “Kachyens and Shans ride on ordinary Chinese saddles. The stirrups are of the usual average length, but the saddles are so constructed as to rise at least a foot above the pony’s back.” He adds with reference to another point in the text: “I noticed a few Shan ponies with docked tails. But the more general practice is to loop up the tail in a knot, the object being to protect the rider, or rather his clothes, from the dirt with which they would otherwise be spattered from the flipping of the animal’s tail.” (MS. Notes.)

[After Yung-ch’ang, Captain Gill writes (II. p. 356): “The manes were hogged and the tails cropped of a great many of the ponies these men were riding; but there were none of the docked tails mentioned by Marco Polo.”—H. C.]

Armour of boiled leather—“armes cuiracés de cuir bouilli”; so Pauthier’s text; the material so often mentioned in mediæval costume; e.g. in the leggings of Sir Thopas:—

“His jambeux were of cuirbouly, His swerdës sheth of ivory, His helme of latoun bright.”

But the reading of the G. Text which is “cuir de bufal,” is probably the right one. Some of the Miau-tzŭ of Kweichau are described as wearing armour of buffalo-leather overlaid with iron plates. (Ritter, IV. 768–776.) Arblasts or crossbows are still characteristic weapons of many of the wilder tribes of this region; e.g. of some of the Singphos, of the Mishmis of Upper Assam, of the Lu-tzŭ of the valley of the Lukiang, of tribes of the hills of Laos, of the Stiens of Cambodia, and of several of the Miau-tzŭ tribes of the interior of China. We give a cut copied from a Chinese work on the Miau-tzŭ of Kweichau in Dr. Lockhart’s possession, which shows three little men of the Sang-Miau tribe of Kweichau combining to mend a crossbow, and a chief with armes cuiracés and jambeux also. [The cut (p. 83) is well explained by this passage of Baber’s Travels among the Lolos (p. 71): “They make their own swords, three and a half to five spans long, with square heads, and have bows which it takes three men to draw, but no muskets.”—H. C.]

NOTE 5.—I have nowhere met with a precise parallel to this remarkable superstition, but the following piece of Folk-Lore has a considerable analogy to it. This extraordinary custom is ascribed by Ibn Fozlan to the Bulgarians of the Volga: “If they find a man endowed with special intelligence then they say: ‘This man should serve our Lord God;’ and so they take him, run a noose round his neck and hang him on a tree, where they leave him till the corpse falls to pieces.” This is precisely what Sir Charles Wood did with the Indian Corps of Engineers;—doubtless on the same principle.

Archbishop Trench, in a fine figure, alludes to a belief prevalent among the Polynesian Islanders, “that the strength and valour of the warriors whom they have slain in battle passes into themselves, as their rightful inheritance.” (Fraehn, Wolga-Bulgaren, p. 50; Studies in the Gospels, p. 22; see also Lubbock, 457.)

There is some analogy also to the story Polo tells, in the curious Sindhi tradition, related by Burton, of Bahá-ul-haḳḳ, the famous saint of Multán. When he visited his disciples at Tatta they plotted his death, in order to secure the blessings of his perpetual presence. The people of Multán are said to have murdered two celebrated saints with the same view, and the Hazáras to “make a point of killing and burying in their own country any stranger indiscreet enough to commit a miracle or show any particular sign of sanctity.” The like practice is ascribed to the rude Moslem of Gilghit; and such allegations must have been current in Europe, for they are the motive of Southey’s St. Romuald:

“‘But,’ quoth the Traveller, ‘wherefore did he leave A flock that knew his saintly worth so well?’ • • • • • “‘Why, Sir,’ the Host replied, ‘We thought perhaps that he might one day leave us; And then, should strangers have The good man’s grave, A loss like that would naturally grieve us; For he’ll be made a saint of, to be sure. Therefore we thought it prudent to secure His relics while we might; And so we meant to strangle him one night.’”

(See Sindh, pp. 86, 388; Ind. Antiq. I. 13; _Southey’s Ballads_, etc., ed. Routledge, p. 330.)

[Captain Gill (I. p. 323) says that he had made up his mind to visit a place called Li-fan Fu, near Ch’êng-tu. “I was told,” he writes, “that this place was inhabited by the Man-Tzŭ, or Barbarians, as the Chinese call them; and Monseigneur Pinchon told me that, amongst other pleasing theories, they were possessed of the belief that if they poisoned a rich man, his wealth would accrue to the poisoner; that, therefore, the hospitable custom prevailed amongst them of administering poison to rich or noble guests; that this poison took no effect for some time, but that in the course of two or three months it produced a disease akin to dysentery, ending in certain death.”—H. C.]

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] [Mr. E. H. Parker writes (China Review, XXIV. p. 106): “Polo’s Kogatin is Hukoch’ih, who was made King of Yun-nan in 1267, with military command over Ta-li, Shen-shen, Chagan Chang, Golden-Teeth, etc.”—H. C.]

[2] Though the bellowing of certain American crocodiles is often spoken of, I have nowhere seen allusion to the roaring of the ghaṛiyál, nor does it seem to be commonly known. I have once only heard it, whilst on the bank of the Ganges near Rampúr Boliah, waiting for a ferry-boat. It was like a loud prolonged snore; and though it seemed to come distinctly from a crocodile on the surface of the river, I made sure by asking a boatman who stood by: “It is the ghaṛiyál speaking,” he answered.Return to passage

L. CONCERNING THE PROVINCE OF ZARDANDAN

When you have left Carajan and have travelled five days westward, you find a province called ZARDANDAN. The people are Idolaters and subject to the Great Kaan. The capital city is called VOCHAN.{1}

The people of this country all have their teeth gilt; or rather every man covers his teeth with a sort of golden case made to fit them, both the upper teeth and the under. The men do this, but not the women.{2} [The men also are wont to gird their arms and legs with bands or fillets pricked in black, and it is done thus; they take five needles joined together, and with these they prick the flesh till the blood comes, and then they rub in a certain black colouring stuff, and this is perfectly indelible. It is considered a piece of elegance and the sign of gentility to have this black band.] The men are all gentlemen in their fashion, and do nothing but go to the wars, or go hunting and hawking. The ladies do all the business, aided by the slaves who have been taken in war.{3}

And when one of their wives has been delivered of a child, the infant is washed and swathed, and then the woman gets up and goes about her household affairs, whilst the husband takes to bed with the child by his side, and so keeps his bed for 40 days; and all the kith and kin come to visit him and keep up a great festivity. They do this because, say they, the woman has had a hard bout of it, and ’tis but fair the man should have his share of suffering.{4}

They eat all kinds of meat, both raw and cooked, and they eat rice with their cooked meat as their fashion is. Their drink is wine made of rice and spices, and excellent it is. Their money is gold, and for small change they use pig-shells. And I can tell you they give one weight of gold for only five of silver; for there is no silver-mine within five months’ journey. And this induces merchants to go thither carrying a large supply of silver to change among that people. And as they have only five weights of silver to give for one of fine gold, they make immense profits by their exchange business in that country.{5}

These people have neither idols nor churches, but worship the progenitor of their family, “for ’tis he,” say they, “from whom we have all sprung.”{6} They have no letters or writing; and ’tis no wonder, for the country is wild and hard of access, full of great woods and mountains which ’tis impossible to pass, the air in summer is so impure and bad; and any foreigners attempting it would die for certain.{7} When these people have any business transactions with one another, they take a piece of stick, round or square, and split it, each taking half. And on either half they cut two or three notches. And when the account is settled the debtor receives back the other half of the stick from the creditor.{8}

And let me tell you that in all those three provinces that I have been speaking of, to wit Carajan, Vochan, and Yachi, there is never a leech. But when any one is ill they send for their magicians, that is to say the Devil-conjurors and those who are the keepers of the idols. When these are come the sick man tells what ails him, and then the conjurors incontinently begin playing on their instruments and singing and dancing; and the conjurors dance to such a pitch that at last one of them shall fall to the ground lifeless, like a dead man. And then the devil entereth into his body. And when his comrades see him in this plight they begin to put questions to him about the sick man’s ailment. And he will reply: “Such or such a spirit hath been meddling with the man,{9} for that he hath angered the spirit and done it some despite.” Then they say: “We pray thee to pardon him, and to take of his blood or of his goods what thou wilt in consideration of thus restoring him to health.” And when they have so prayed, the malignant spirit that is in the body of the prostrate man will (mayhap) answer: “The sick man hath also done great despite unto such another spirit, and that one is so ill-disposed that it will not pardon him on any account;”—this at least is the answer they get, an the patient be like to die. But if he is to get better the answer will be that they are to bring two sheep, or may be three; and to brew ten or twelve jars of drink, very costly and abundantly spiced.{10} Moreover it shall be announced that the sheep must be all black-faced, or of some other particular colour as it may hap; and then all those things are to be offered in sacrifice to such and such a spirit whose name is given.{11} And they are to bring so many conjurors, and so many ladies, and the business is to be done with a great singing of lauds, and with many lights, and store of good perfumes. That is the sort of answer they get if the patient is to get well. And then the kinsfolk of the sick man go and procure all that has been commanded, and do as has been bidden, and the conjuror who had uttered all that gets on his legs again.

So they fetch the sheep of the colour prescribed, and slaughter them, and sprinkle the blood over such places as have been enjoined, in honour and propitiation of the spirit. And the conjurors come, and the ladies, in the number that was ordered, and when all are assembled and everything is ready, they begin to dance and play and sing in honour of the spirit. And they take flesh-broth and drink and lign-aloes, and a great number of lights, and go about hither and thither, scattering the broth and the drink and the meat also. And when they have done this for a while, again shall one of the conjurors fall flat and wallow there foaming at the mouth, and then the others will ask if he have yet pardoned the sick man? And sometimes he shall answer yea! and sometimes he shall answer no! And if the answer be no, they shall be told that something or other has to be done all over again, and then he will be pardoned; so this they do. And when all that the spirit has commanded has been done with great ceremony, then it shall be announced that the man is pardoned and shall be speedily cured. So when they at length receive such a reply, they announce that it is all made up with the spirit, and that he is propitiated, and they fall to eating and drinking with great joy and mirth, and he who had been lying lifeless on the ground gets up and takes his share. So when they have all eaten and drunken, every man departs home. And presently the sick man gets sound and well.{12}

Now that I have told you of the customs and naughty ways of that people, we will have done talking of them and their province, and I will tell you about others, all in regular order and succession.

NOTE 1.—[Baber writes (Travels, p. 171) when arriving to the Lan-tsang kiang (Mekong River): “We were now on the border-line between Carajan and Zardandan: ‘When you have travelled five days you find a province called Zardandan,’ says Messer Marco, precisely the actual number of stages from Tali-fu to the present boundary of Yung-ch’ang. That this river must have been the demarcation between the two provinces is obvious; one glance into that deep rift, the only exit from which is by painful worked artificial zigzags which, under the most favourable conditions, cannot be called safe, will satisfy the most sceptical geographer. The exact statement of distance is a proof that Marco entered the territory of Yung-ch’ang.” Captain Gill says (II. p. 343–344) that the five marches of Marco Polo “would be very long ones. Our journey was eight days, but it might easily have been done in seven, as the first march to Hsia-Kuan was not worthy of the name. The Grosvenor expedition made eleven marches with one day’s halt—twelve days altogether, and Mr. Margary was nine or ten days on the journey. It is true that, by camping out every night, the marches might be longer; and, as Polo refers to the crackling of the bamboos in the fires, it is highly probable that he found no ‘fine hostelries’ on this route. This is the way the traders still travel in Tibet; they march until they are tired, or until they find a nice grassy spot; they then off saddles, turn their animals loose, light a fire under some adjacent tree, and halt for the night; thus the longest possible distance can be performed every day, and the five days from Ta-li to Yung-Ch’ang would not be by any means an impossibility.”—H. C.]

NOTE 2.—Ramusio says that both men and women use this gold case. There can be no better instance of the accuracy with which Polo is generally found to have represented Oriental names, when we recover his real representation of them, than this name Zardandan. In the old Latin editions the name appeared as Ardandan, Arcladam, etc.; in Ramusio as Cardandan, correctly enough, only the first letter should have been printed Ç. Marsden, carrying out his systematic conversion of the Ramusian spelling, made this into Kardandan, and thus the name became irrecognizable. Klaproth, I believe, first showed that the word was simply the Persian ZĂR-DANDÁN, “Gold-Teeth,” and produced quotations from Rashiduddin mentioning the people in question by that identical name. Indeed that historian mentions them several times. Thus: “North-west of China is the frontier of Tibet, and of the ZARDANDAN, who lie between Tibet and Karájáng. These people cover their teeth with a gold case, which they take off when they eat.” They are also frequently mentioned in the Chinese annals about this period under the same name, viz. Kin-Chi, “Gold-Teeth,” and some years after Polo’s departure from the East they originated a revolt against the Mongol yoke, in which a great number of the imperial troops were massacred. (De Mailla, IX. 478–479.)

[Baber writes (p. 159): “In Western Yünnan the betel-nut is chewed with prepared lime, colouring the teeth red, and causing a profuse expectoration. We first met with the practice near Tali-fu.

“Is it not possible that the red colour imparted to the teeth by the practice of chewing betel with lime may go some way to account for the ancient name of this region, ‘Zar-dandan,’ ‘Chin-Ch’ih,’ or ‘Golden-Teeth’? Betel-chewing is, of course, common all over China; but the use of lime is almost unknown and the teeth are not necessarily discoloured.

“In the neighbourhood of Tali, one comes suddenly upon a lime-chewing people, and is at once struck with the strange red hue of their teeth and gums. That some of the natives used formerly to cover their teeth with plates of gold (from which practice, mentioned by Marco Polo, and confirmed elsewhere, the name is generally derived) can scarcely be considered a myth; but the peculiarity remarked by ourselves would have been equally noticeable by the early Chinese invaders, and seems not altogether unworthy of consideration. It is interesting to find the name ‘Chin-Ch’ih’ still in use.

“When Tu Wên-hsiu sent his ‘Panthay’ mission to England with tributary boxes of rock from the Tali Mountains, he described himself in his letter ‘as a humble native of the golden-teeth country.’”—H. C.]

Vochan seems undoubtedly to be, as Martini pointed out, the city called by the Chinese YUNG-CH’ANG-FU. Some of the old printed editions read Unciam, i.e. Uncham or Unchan, and it is probable that either this or Võcian, i.e. VONCHAN, was the true reading, coming very close to the proper name, which is WUNCHEN. (See J. A. S. B. VI. 547.) [In an itinerary from Ava to Peking, we read on the 10th September, 1833: “Slept at the city Wun-tsheng (Chinese Yongtchang fú and Burmese Wun-zen).” (Chin. Rep. IX. p. 474.)—Mr. F. W. K. Müller in a study on the Pa-yi language from a Chinese manuscript entitled Hwa-i-yi-yü found by Dr. F. Hirth in China, and belonging now to the Berlin Royal Library, says the proper orthography of the word is Wan-chang in Pa-yi. (T’oung Pao, III. p. 20.) This helps to find the origin of the name Vochan.—H. C.] This city has been a Chinese one for several centuries, and previous to the late Mahomedan revolt its population was almost exclusively Chinese, with only a small mixture of Shans. It is now noted for the remarkable beauty and fairness of the women. But it is mentioned by Chinese authors as having been in the Middle Ages the capital of the Gold-Teeth. These people, according to Martini, dwelt chiefly to the north of the city. They used to go to worship a huge stone, 100 feet high, at Nan-ngan, and cover it annually with gold-leaf. Some additional particulars about the Kin-Chi, in the time of the Mongols, will be found in Pauthier’s notes (p. 398).

[In 1274, the Burmese attacked Yung ch’ang, whose inhabitants were known under the name of Kin-Chi (Golden-Teeth). (E. Rocher, Princes du Yun-nan, p. 71.) From the Annals of Momein, translated by Mr. E. H. Parker (China Review, XX. p. 345), we learn that: “In the year 1271, the General of Ta-li was sent on a mission to procure the submission of the Burmese, and managed to bring a Burmese envoy named Kiai-poh back with him. Four years later Fu A-pih, Chief of the Golden-Teeth, was utilised as a guide, which so angered the Burmese that they detained Fu A-pih and attacked Golden-Teeth: but he managed to bribe himself free. A-ho, Governor of the Golden-Teeth, was now sent as a spy, which caused the Burmese to advance to the attack once more, but they were driven back by Twan Sin-cha-jih. These events led to the Burmese war,” which lasted till 1301.

According to the Hwang-tsing Chi-kung t’u (quoted by Devéria, Front. p. 130), the Pei-jen were Kin-chi, of Pa-y race, and were surnamed Min-kia-tzŭ; the Min-kia, according to F. Garnier, say that they come from Nan-king, but this is certainly an error for the Pei-jen. From another Chinese work, Devéria (p. 169) gives this information: The Piao are the Kin-Chi; they submitted to the Mongols in the 13th century; they are descended from the people of Chu-po or Piao Kwo (Kingdom of Piao), ancient Pegu; P’u-p’iao, in a little valley between the Mekong and the Salwen Rivers, was the place through which the P’u and the Piao entered China.

The Chinese geographical work Fang-yu-ki-yao mentions the name of Kin-Chi Ch’eng, or city of Kin-Chi, as the ancient denomination of Yung-ch’ang. A Chinese Pa-y vocabulary, belonging to Professor Devéria, translates Kin-Chi by Wan-Chang (Yung-ch’ang). (Devéria, Front. p. 128.)—H. C.]

It has not been determined who are the representatives of these Gold-Teeth, who were evidently distinct from the Shans, not Buddhist, and without literature. I should think it probable that they were Kakhyens or Singphos, who, excluding Shans, appear to form the greatest body in that quarter, and are closely akin to each other, indeed essentially identical in race.[1] The Singphos have now extended widely to the west of the Upper Irawadi and northward into Assam, but their traditions bring them from the borders of Yunnan. The original and still most populous seat of the Kakhyen or Singpho race is pointed out by Colonel Hannay in the Gulansigung Mountains and the valley of the eastern source of the Irawadi. This agrees with Martini’s indication of the seat of the Kin-Chi as north of Yung-ch’ang. One of Hannay’s notices of Singpho customs should also be compared with the interpolation from Ramusio about tattooing: “The men tattoo their limbs slightly, and all married females are tattooed on both legs from the ankle to the knee, in broad horizontal circular bands. Both sexes also wear rings below the knee of fine shreds of rattan varnished black” (p. 18). These rings appear on the Kakhyen woman in our cut.

The only other wild tribe spoken of by Major Sladen as attending the markets on the frontier is that of the Lissus, already mentioned by Lieutenant Garnier (supra, ch. xlvii. note 6), and who are said to be the most savage and indomitable of the tribes in that quarter. Garnier also mentions the Mossos, who are alleged once to have formed an independent kingdom about Li-kiang fu. Possibly, however, the Gold-Teeth may have become entirely absorbed in the Chinese and Shan population.

The characteristic of casing the teeth in gold should identify the tribe did it still exist. But I can learn nothing of the continued existence of such a custom among any tribe of the Indo-Chinese continent. The insertion of gold studs or spots, which Bürck confounds with it, is common enough among Indo-Chinese races, but that is quite a different thing. The actual practice of the Zardandan is, however, followed by some of the people of Sumatra, as both Marsden and Raffles testify: “The great men sometimes set their teeth in gold, by casing with a plate of that metal the under row ... it is sometimes indented to the shape of the teeth, but more usually quite plain. They do not remove it either to eat or sleep.” The like custom is mentioned by old travellers at Macassar, and with the substitution of silver for gold by a modern traveller as existing in Timor; but in both, probably, it was a practice of Malay tribes, as in Sumatra. (Marsden’s Sumatra, 3rd ed., p. 52; Raffles’s Java, I. 105; Bickmore’s Ind. Archipelago.)

[In his second volume of The River of Golden Sand, Captain Gill has two chapters (viii. and ix.) with the title: In the footsteps of Marco Polo and of Augustus Margary devoted to The Land of the Gold-Teeth and The Marches of the Kingdom of Mien.—H. C.]

NOTE 3.—This is precisely the account which Lieutenant Garnier gives of the people of Laos: “The Laos people are very indolent, and when they are not rich enough to possess slaves they make over to their women the greatest part of the business of the day; and ’tis these latter who not only do all the work of the house, but who husk the rice, work in the fields, and paddle the canoes. Hunting and fishing are almost the only occupations which pertain exclusively to the stronger sex.” (Notice sur le Voyage d’Exploration, etc., p. 34.)

NOTE 4.—This highly eccentric practice has been ably illustrated and explained by Mr. Tylor, under the name of the Couvade, or “Hatching,” by which it is known in some of the Béarn districts of the Pyrenees, where it formerly existed, as it does still or did recently, in some Basque districts of Spain. [In a paper on La Couvade chez les Basques, published in the République Française, of 19th January, 1877, and reprinted in Études de Linguistique et d’Ethnographie par A. Hovelacque et Julien Vinson, Paris, 1878, Prof. Vinson quotes the following curious passage from the poem in ten cantos, Luciniade, by Sacombe, of Carcassonne (Paris and Nîmes, 1790):

“En Amérique, en Corse, et chez l’Ibérien, En France même encor chez le Vénarnien, Au pays Navarrois, lorsqu’une femme accouche, L’épouse sort du lit et le mari se couche; Et, quoiqu’il soit très sain et d’esprit et de corps, Contre un mal qu’il n’a point l’art unit ses efforts. On le met au régime, et notre faux malade, Soigné par l’accouchée, en son lit fait couvade: On ferme avec grand soin portes, volets, rideaux; Immobile, on l’oblige à rester sur le dos, Pour étouffer son lait, qui gêné dans sa course, Pourrait en l’étouffant remonter vers sa source. Un mari, dans sa couche, au médecin soumis, Reçoit, en cet état, parents, voisins, amis, Qui viennent l’exhorter à prendre patience Et font des vœux au ciel pour sa convalescence.”

Professor Vinson, who is an authority on the subject, comes to the conclusion that it is not possible to ascribe to the Basques the custom of the couvade.

Mr. Tylor writes to me that he “did not quite begin the use of this good French word in the sense of the ‘man-child-bed’ as they call it in Germany. It occurs in Rochefort, Iles Antilles, and though Dr. Murray, of the English Dictionary, maintains that it is spurious, if so, it is better than any genuine word I know of.”—H. C.] “In certain valleys of Biscay,” says Francisque-Michel, “in which the popular usages carry us back to the infancy of society, the woman immediately after her delivery gets up and attends to the cares of the household, whilst the husband takes to bed with the tender fledgeling in his arms, and so receives the compliments of his neighbours.”

The nearest people to the Zardandan of whom I find this custom elsewhere recorded, is one called Langszi,[2] a small tribe of aborigines in the department of Wei-ning, in Kweichau, but close to the border of Yun-nan: “Their manners and customs are very extraordinary. For example, when the wife has given birth to a child, the husband remains in the house and holds it in his arms for a whole month, not once going out of doors. The wife in the mean time does all the work in doors and out, and provides and serves up both food and drink for the husband, she only giving suck to the child.” I am informed also that, among the Miris on the Upper Assam border, the husband on such occasions confines himself strictly to the house for forty days after the event.

The custom of the Couvade has especially and widely prevailed in South America, not only among the Carib races of Guiana, of the Spanish Main, and (where still surviving) of the West Indies, but among many tribes of Brazil and its borders from the Amazons to the Plate, and among the Abipones of Paraguay; it also exists or has existed among the aborigines of California, in West Africa, in Bouro, one of the Moluccas, and among a wandering tribe of the Telugu-speaking districts of Southern India. According to Diodorus it prevailed in ancient Corsica, according to Strabo among the Iberians of Northern Spain (where we have seen it has lingered to recent times), according to Apollonius Rhodius among the Tibareni of Pontus. Modified traces of a like practice, not carried to the same extent of oddity, are also found in a variety of countries besides those that have been named, as in Borneo, in Kamtchatka, and in Greenland. In nearly all cases some particular diet, or abstinence from certain kinds of food and drink, and from exertion, is prescribed to the father; in some, more positive and trying penances are inflicted.

Butler had no doubt our Traveller’s story in his head when he made the widow in Hudibras allude in a ribald speech to the supposed fact that

————“Chineses go to bed And lie in, in their ladies’ stead.”

The custom is humorously introduced, as Pauthier has noticed, in the Mediæval Fabliau of Aucassin and Nicolete. Aucassin arriving at the castle of Torelore asks for the king and is told he is in child-bed. Where then is his wife? She is gone to the wars and has taken all the people with her. Aucassin, greatly astonished, enters the palace, and wanders through it till he comes to the chamber where the king lay:—

“En le canbre entre Aucassins Li cortois et li gentis; Il est venus dusqu’au lit Alec ú li Rois se gist. Pardevant lui s’arestit Si parla, Oès que dist; Diva fau, que fais-tu ci? Dist le Rois, Je gis d’un fil, Quant mes mois sera complis, Et ge serai bien garis, Dont irai le messe oïr Si comme mes ancessor fist,” etc.

Aucassin pulls all the clothes off him, and cudgels him soundly, making him promise that never a man shall lie in again in his country.

This strange custom, if it were unique, would look like a coarse practical joke, but appearing as it does among so many different races and in every quarter of the world, it must have its root somewhere deep in the psychology of the uncivilised man. I must refer to Mr. Tylor’s interesting remarks on the rationale of the custom, for they do not bear abridgment. Professor Max Müller humorously suggests that “the treatment which a husband receives among ourselves at the time of his wife’s confinement, not only from mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, and other female relations, but from nurses, and from every consequential maid-servant in the house,” is but a “survival,” as Mr. Tylor would call it, of the couvade; or at least represents the same feeling which among those many uncivilised nations thus drove the husband to his bed, and sometimes (as among the Caribs) put him when there to systematic torture.

(Tylor, Researches, 288–296; Michel, Le Pays Basque, p. 201; Sketches of the Meau-tsze, transl. by Bridgman in J. of North China Br. of R. As. Soc., p. 277; Hudibras, Pt. III., canto I. 707; Fabliaus et Contes par Barbazan, éd. Méon, I. 408–409; Indian Antiq. III. 151; Müller’s Chips, II. 227 seqq.; many other references in TYLOR, and in a capital monograph by Dr. H. H. Ploss of Leipzig, received during revision of this sheet: ‘Das Männerkindbett.’ What a notable example of the German power of compounding is that title!)

[This custom seems to be considered generally as a survival of the matriarchate in a society with a patriarchal régime. We may add to the list of authorities on this subject: E. Westermarck, Hist. of Human Marriage, 106, seqq.; G. A. Wilken, De Couvade bij de Volken v.d. Indischen Archipel, Bijdr. Ind. Inst., 5th ser., iv. p. 250. Dr. Ernest Martin, late physician of the French Legation at Peking, in an article on La Couvade en Chine (Revue Scientifique, 24th March, 1894), gave a drawing representing the couvade from a sketch by a native artist.

In the China Review (XI. pp. 401–402), “Lao Kwang-tung” notes these interesting facts: “The Chinese believe that certain actions performed by the husband during the pregnancy of his wife will affect the child. If a dish of food on the table is raised by putting another dish, or anything else below it, it is not considered proper for a husband, who is expecting the birth of a child, to partake of it, for fear the two dishes should cause the child to have two tongues. It is extraordinary that the caution thus exercised by the Chinese has not prevented many of them from being double-tongued. This result, it is supposed, however, will only happen if the food so raised is eaten in the house in which the future mother happens to be. It is thought that the pasting up of the red papers containing antithetical and felicitous sentences on them, as at New Year’s time, by a man under similar circumstances, and this whether the future mother sees the action performed or not, will cause the child to have red marks on the face or any part of the body. The causes producing naevi materni have probably been the origin of such marks, rather than the idea entertained by the Chinese that the father, having performed an action by some occult mode, influences the child yet unborn. A case is said to have occurred in which ill effects were obviated, or rather obliterated, by the red papers being torn down, after the birth of the infant, and soaked in water, when as the red disappeared from the paper, so the child’s face assumed a natural hue. Lord Avebury also speaks of la couvade as existing among the Chinese of West Yun-Nan. (Origin of Civilisation and Primitive Condition of Man, p. 18).”

Dr. J. A. H. Murray, editor of the New English Dictionary, wrote, in The Academy, of 29th October, 1892, a letter with the heading of Couvade, The Genesis of an Anthropological Term, which elicited an answer from Dr. E. B. Tylor (Academy, 5th November): “Wanting a general term for such customs,” writes Dr. Tylor, “and finding statements in books that this male lying-in lasted on till modern times, in the south of France, and was there called couvade, that is brooding or hatching (couver), I adopted this word for the set of customs, and it has since become established in English.” The discussion was carried on in The Academy, 12th and 19th November, 10th and 17th December; Mr. A. L. Mayhew wrote (12th November): “There is no doubt whatever that Dr. Tylor and Professor Max Müller (in a review of Dr. Tylor’s book) share the glory of having given a new technical sense to an old provincial French word, and of seeing it accepted in France, and safely enshrined in the great Dictionary of Littré.”

Now as to the origin of the word; we have seen above that Rochefort was the first to use the expression faire la couvade. This author, or at least the author (see Barbier, Ouvrages anonymes) of the Histoire naturelle ... des Iles Antilles, which was published for the first time at Rotterdam, in 1658, 4to., writes: “C’est qu’au méme tems que la femme est delivrée le mary se met au lit, pour s’y plaindre et y faire l’acouchée: coutume, qui bien que Sauvage et ridicule, se trouve neantmoins à ce que l’on dit, parmy les paysans d’vne certaine Province de France. Et ils appellent cela faire la couvade. Mais ce qui est de fâcheus pour le pauvre Caraïbe, qui s’est mis au lit au lieu de l’acouchée, c’est qu’on luy fait faire diéte dix ou douze jours de suite, ne luy donnant rien par jour qu’vn petit morceau de Cassave, et vn peu d’eau dans la quelle on a aussi fait boüillir un peu de ce pain de racine.... Mais ils ne font ce grand jeusne qu’à la naissance de leur premier enfant....” (II. pp. 607–608).

Lafitau (Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquains, I. pp. 49–50) says on the authority of Rochefort: “Je la trouve chez les Ibériens ou les premiers Peuples d’Espagne ... elle est aujourd’hui dans quelques unes de nos Provinces d’Espagne.”

The word couvade, forgotten in the sense of lying-in-bed, recalled by Sacombe, has been renovated in a happy manner by Dr. Tylor.

As to the custom itself, there can be no doubt of its existence, in spite of some denials. Dr. Tylor, in the third edition of his valuable Early History of Mankind, published in 1878 (Murray), since the last edition of The Book of Ser Marco Polo, has added (pp. 291 seqq.) many more proofs to support what he had already said on the subject.

There may be some strong doubts as to the couvade in the south of France, and the authors who speak of it in Béarn and the Basque Countries seem to have copied one another, but there is not the slightest doubt of its having been and of its being actually practised in South America. There is a very curious account of it in the Voyage dans le Nord du Brésil made by Father Yves d’Evreux in 1613 and 1614 (see pp. 88–89 of the reprint, Paris, 1864, and the note of the learned Ferdinand Denis, pp. 411–412). Compare with Durch Central-Brasilien ... im Jahre 1884 von K.v. den Steinen. But the following extract from Among the Indians of Guiana.... By Everard im Thurn (1883), will settle, I think, the question:

“Turning from the story of the day to the story of the life, we may begin at the beginning, that is, at the birth of the children. And here, at once, we meet with, perhaps, the most curious point in the habits of the Indians; the couvade or male child-bed. This custom, which is common to the uncivilized people of many parts of the world, is probably among the strangest ever invented by the human brain. Even before the child is born, the father abstains for a time from certain kinds of animal food. The woman works as usual up to a few hours before the birth of the child. At last she retires alone, or accompanied only by some other women, to the forest, where she ties up her hammock; and then the child is born. Then in a few hours—often less than a day—the woman, who, like all women living in a very unartificial condition, suffers but little, gets up and resumes her ordinary work. According to Schomburgk, the mother, at any rate among the Macusis, remains in her hammock for some time, and the father hangs his hammock, and lies in it, by her side; but in all cases where the matter came under my notice, the mother left her hammock almost at once. In any case, no sooner is the child born than the father takes to his hammock and, abstaining from every sort of work, from meat and all other food, except weak gruel of cassava meal, from smoking, from washing himself, and, above all, from touching weapons of any sort, is nursed and cared for by all the women of the place. One other regulation, mentioned by Schomburgk, is certainly quaint; the interesting father may not scratch himself with his finger-nails, but he may use for this purpose a splinter, specially provided, from the mid-rib of a cokerite palm. This continues for many days, and sometimes even weeks. Couvade is such a wide-spread institution, that I had often read and wondered at it; but it was not until I saw it practised around me, and found that I was often suddenly deprived of the services of my best hunters or boat-hands, by the necessity which they felt, and which nothing could persuade them to disregard, of observing couvade, that I realized its full strangeness. No satisfactory explanation of its origin seems attainable. It appears based on a belief in the existence of a mysterious connection between the child and its father—far closer than that which exists between the child and its mother,—and of such a nature that if the father infringes any of the rules of the couvade, for a time after the birth of the child, the latter suffers. For instance, if he eats the flesh of a water-haas (Capybara), a large rodent with very protruding teeth, the teeth of the child will grow as those of the animal; or if he eats the flesh of the spotted-skinned labba, the child’s skin will become spotted. Apparently there is also some idea that for the father to eat strong food, to wash, to smoke, or to handle weapons, would have the same result as if the new-born babe ate such food, washed, smoked, or played with edged tools” (pp. 217–219.)

I have to thank Dr. Edward B. Tylor for the valuable notes he kindly sent me.—H. C.]

NOTE 5.—“The abundance of gold in Yun-nan is proverbial in China, so that if a man lives very extravagantly they ask if his father is governor of Yun-nan.” (Martini, p. 140.)

Polo has told us that in Eastern Yun-nan the exchange was 8 of silver for one of gold (ch. xlviii.); in the Western division of the province 6 of silver for one of gold (ch. xlix.); and now, still nearer the borders of Ava, only 5 of silver for one of gold. Such discrepancies within 15 days’ journey would be inconceivable, but that in both the latter instances at least he appears to speak of the rates at which the gold was purchased from secluded, ignorant, and uncivilised tribes. It is difficult to reconcile with other facts the reason which he assigns for the high value put on silver at Vochan, viz., that there was no silver-mine within five months’ journey. In later days, at least, Martini speaks of many silver-mines in Yun-nan, and the “Great Silver Mine” (Bau-dwen gyi of the Burmese) or group of mines, which affords a chief supply to Burma in modern times, is not far from the territory of our Traveller’s Zardandan. Garnier’s map shows several argentiferous sites in the Valley of the Lan-t’sang.

In another work[3] I have remarked at some length on the relative values of gold and silver about this time. In Western Europe these seem to have been as 12 to 1, and I have shown grounds for believing that in India, and generally over civilised Asia, the ratio was 10 to 1. In Pauthier’s extracts from the Yuen-shi or Annals of the Mongol Dynasty, there is an incidental but precise confirmation of this, of which I was not then aware. This states (p. 321) that on the issue of the paper currency of 1287 the official instructions to the local treasuries were to issue notes of the nominal value of two strings, i.e. 2000 wen or cash, for every ounce of flowered silver, and 20,000 cash for every ounce of gold. Ten to 1 must have continued to be the relation in China down to about the end of the 17th century if we may believe Lecomte; but when Milburne states the same value in the beginning of the 19th he must have fallen into some great error. In 1781 Sonnerat tells us that formerly gold had been exported from China with a profit of 25 per cent., but at that time a profit of 18 to 20 per cent. was made by importing it. At present[4] the relative values are about the same as in Europe, viz. 1 to 15½ or 1 to 16; but in Canton, in 1844, they were 1 to 17; and Timkowski states that at Peking in 1821 the finest gold was valued at 18 to 1. And as regards the precise territory of which this chapter speaks I find in Lieutenant Bower’s Commercial Report on Sladen’s Mission that the price of pure gold at Momein in 1868 was 13 times its weight in silver (p. 122); whilst M. Garnier mentions that the exchange at Ta-li in 1869 was 12 to 1 (I. 522).

Does not Shakspeare indicate at least a memory of 10 to 1 as the traditional relation of gold to silver when he makes the Prince of Morocco, balancing over Portia’s caskets, argue:—

“Or shall I think in silver she’s immured, Being ten times undervalued to tried gold? O sinful thought!”

In Japan, at the time trade was opened, we know from Sir R. Alcock’s work the extraordinary fact that the proportionate value set upon gold and silver currency by authority was as 3 to 1.

(Cathay, etc., p. ccl. and p. 442; Lecomte, II. 91; Milburne’s Oriental Commerce, II. 510; Sonnerat, II. 17; Hedde, Etude, Pratique, etc., p. 14; Williams, Chinese Commercial Guide, p. 129; Timkowski, II. 202; Alcock, I. 281; II. 411, etc.)

NOTE 6.—Mr. Lay cites from a Chinese authority a notice of a tribe of “Western Miautsze,” who “in the middle of autumn sacrifice to the Great Ancestor or Founder of their Race.” (The Chinese as they are, p. 321.)

NOTE 7.—Dr. Anderson confirms the depressing and unhealthy character of the summer climate at Momein, though standing between 5000 and 6000 feet above the sea (p. 41).

NOTE 8.—“Whereas before,” says Jack Cade to Lord Say, “our forefathers had no books but score and tally, thou hast caused printing to be used.” The use of such tallies for the record of contracts among the aboriginal tribes of Kweichau is mentioned by Chinese authorities, and the French missionaries of Bonga speak of the same as in use among the simple tribes in that vicinity. But, as Marsden notes, the use of such rude records was to be found in his day in higher places and much nearer home. They continued to be employed as records of receipts in the British Exchequer till 1834, “and it is worthy of recollection that the fire by which the Houses of Parliament were destroyed was supposed to have originated in the over-heating of the flues in which the discarded tallies were being burnt.” I remember often, when a child, to have seen the tallies of the colliers in Scotland, and possibly among that class they may survive. They appear to be still used by bakers in various parts of England and France, in the Canterbury hop-gardens, and locally in some other trades. (Martini, 135; Bridgman, 259, 262; Eng. Cyclop. sub v. Tally; Notes and Queries, 1st ser. X. 485.)

[According to Father Crabouillet (Missions Cath. 1873, p. 105), the Lolos use tallies for their contracts; Dr. Harmand mentions (Tour du Monde, 1877, No. VII.) the same fact among the Khas of Central Laos; and M. Pierre Lefèvre-Pontalis (Populations du nord de l’Indo-Chine, 1892, p. 22, from the J. As.) says he saw these tallies among the Khas of Luang-Prabang.—H. C.]

“In Illustration of this custom I have to relate what follows. In the year 1863 the Tsaubwa (or Prince) of a Shan Province adjoining Yun-nan was in rebellion against the Burmese Government. He wished to enter into communication with the British Government. He sent a messenger to a British Officer with a letter tendering his allegiance, and accompanying this letter was a piece of bamboo about five inches long. This had been split down the middle, so that the two pieces fitted closely together, forming a tube in the original shape of the bamboo. A notch at one end included the edges of both pieces, showing that they were a pair. The messenger said that if the reply were favourable one of the pieces was to be returned and the other kept. I need hardly say the messenger received no written reply, and both pieces of bamboo were retained.” (MS. Note by Sir Arthur Phayre.)

NOTE 9.—Compare Mr. Hodgson’s account of the sub-Himalayan Bodos and Dhimals: “All diseases are ascribed to supernatural agency. The sick man is supposed to be possessed by one of the deities, who racks him with pain as a punishment for impiety or neglect of the god in question. Hence not the mediciner, but the exorcist, is summoned to the sick man’s aid.” (J. A. S. B. XVIII. 728.)

NOTE 10.—Mr. Hodgson again: “Libations of fermented liquor always accompany sacrifice—because, to confess the whole truth, sacrifice and feast are commutable words, and feasts need to be crowned with copious potations.” (Ibid.)

NOTE 11.—And again: “The god in question is asked what sacrifice he requires? a buffalo, a hog, a fowl, or a duck, to spare the sufferer; ... anxious as I am fully to illustrate the topic, I will not try the patience of my readers by describing all that vast variety of black victims and white, of red victims and blue, which each particular deity is alleged to prefer.” (Ibid. and p. 732.)

NOTE 12.—The same system of devil-dancing is prevalent among the tribes on the Lu-kiang, as described by the R. C. Missionaries. The conjurors are there called Mumos. (Ann. de la Prop. de la Foi, XXXVI. 323, and XXXVII. 312–313.)

“Marco’s account of the exorcism of evil spirits in cases of obstinate illness exactly resembles what is done in similar cases by the Burmese, except that I never saw animals sacrificed on such occasions.” (Sir A. Phayre.)

Mouhot says of the wild people of Cambodia called Stiens: “When any one is ill they say that the Evil Spirit torments him; and to deliver him they set up about the patient a dreadful din which does not cease night or day, until some one among the bystanders falls down as if in a syncope, crying out, ‘I have him,—he is in me,—he is strangling me!’ Then they question the person who has thus become possessed. They ask him what remedies will save the patient; what remedies does the Evil Spirit require that he may give up his prey? Sometimes it is an ox or a pig; but too often it is a human victim.” (J. R. G. S. XXXII. 147.)

See also the account of the Samoyede Tadibeï or Devil-dancer in Klaproth’s Magasin Asiatique (II. 83).

In fact these strange rites of Shamanism, devil-dancing, or what not, are found with wonderful identity of character among the non-Caucasian races over parts of the earth most remote from one another, not only among the vast variety of Indo-Chinese Tribes, but among the Tamulian tribes of India, the Veddahs of Ceylon, the races of Siberia, and the red nations of North and South America. Hinduism has assimilated these “prior superstitions of the sons of Tur” as Mr. Hodgson calls them, in the form of Tantrika mysteries, whilst, in the wild performance of the Dancing Dervishes at Constantinople, we see perhaps again the infection of Turanian blood breaking out from the very heart of Mussulman orthodoxy.

Dr. Caldwell has given a striking account of the practice of devil-dancing among the Shanars of Tinnevelly, which forms a perfect parallel in modern language to our Traveller’s description of a scene of which he also had manifestly been an eye-witness: “When the preparations are completed and the devil-dance is about to commence, the music is at first comparatively slow; the dancer seems impassive and sullen, and he either stands still or moves about in gloomy silence. Gradually, as the music becomes quicker and louder, his excitement begins to rise. Sometimes, to help him to work himself up into a frenzy, he uses medicated draughts, cuts and lacerates himself till the blood flows, lashes himself with a huge whip, presses a burning torch to his breast, drinks the blood which flows from his own wounds, or drains the blood of the sacrifice, putting the throat of the decapitated goat to his mouth. Then, as if he had acquired new life, he begins to brandish his staff of bells, and to dance with a quick but wild unsteady step. Suddenly the afflatus descends; there is no mistaking that glare, or those frantic leaps. He snorts, he stares, he gyrates. The demon has now taken bodily possession of him, and though he retains the power of utterance and motion, both are under the demon’s control, and his separate consciousness is in abeyance. The bystanders signalise the event by raising a long shout, attended with a peculiar vibratory noise, caused by the motion of the hand and tongue, or the tongue alone. The devil-dancer is now worshipped as a present deity, and every bystander consults him respecting his diseases, his wants, the welfare of his absent relatives, the offerings to be made for the accomplishment of his wishes, and in short everything for which superhuman knowledge is supposed to be available.” (Hodgson, J. R. As. Soc. XVIII. 397; The Tinnevelly Shanars, by the Rev. R. Caldwell, B.A., Madras, 1849, pp. 19–20.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] “Singpho,” says Colonel Hannay, “signifies in the Kakhyen language ‘a man,’ and all of this race who have settled in Hookong or Assam are thus designated; the reason of their change of name I could not ascertain, but so much importance seems to be attached to it, that the Singphos, in talking of their eastern and southern neighbours, call them Kakhyens or Kakoos, and consider it an insult to be called so themselves.” (Sketch of the Singphos, or the Kakhyens of Burma, Calcutta, 1847, pp. 3–4.) If, however, the Kakhyens, or Kachyens (as Major Sladen calls them), are represented by the Go-tchang of Pauthier’s Chinese extracts, these seem to be distinguished from the Kin-Chi, though associated with them. (See pp. 397, 411.)

[2] [Mr. E. H. Parker (China Review, XIV. p. 359) says that Colonel Yule’s Langszi are evidently the Szilang, one of the six Chao, but turned upside down.—H. C.]Return to passage

[3] Cathay, etc., pp. ccl. seqq. and p. 441.Return to passage

[4] Written in 1870.Return to passage

Chapter LI

WHEREIN IS RELATED HOW THE KING OF MIEN AND BANGALA VOWED VENGEANCE AGAINST THE GREAT KAAN.

But I was forgetting to tell you of a famous battle that was fought in the kingdom of Vochan in the Province of Zardandan, and that ought not to be omitted from our Book. So we will relate all the particulars.

You see, in the year of Christ, 1272,{1} the Great Kaan sent a large force into the kingdoms of Carajan and Vochan, to protect them from the ravages of ill-disposed people; and this was before he had sent any of his sons to rule the country, as he did afterwards when he made Sentemur king there, the son of a son of his who was deceased.

Now there was a certain king, called the king of MIEN and of BANGALA, who was a very puissant prince, with much territory and treasure and people; and he was not as yet subject to the Great Kaan, though it was not long after that the latter conquered him and took from him both the kingdoms that I have named.{2} And it came to pass that when this king of Mien and Bangala heard that the host of the Great Kaan was at Vochan, he said to himself that it behoved him to go against them with so great a force as should insure his cutting off the whole of them, insomuch that the Great Kaan would be very sorry ever to send an army again thither [to his frontier].

So this king prepared a great force and munitions of war; and he had, let me tell you, 2000 great elephants, on each of which was set a tower of timber, well framed and strong, and carrying from twelve to sixteen well-armed fighting men.{3} And besides these, he had of horsemen and of footmen good 60,000 men. In short, he equipped a fine force, as well befitted such a puissant prince. It was indeed a host capable of doing great things.

And what shall I tell you? When the king had completed these great preparations to fight the Tartars, he tarried not, but straightway marched against them. And after advancing without meeting with anything worth mentioning, they arrived within three days of the Great Kaan’s host, which was then at Vochan in the territory of Zardandan, of which I have already spoken. So there the king pitched his camp, and halted to refresh his army.

NOTE 1.—This date is no doubt corrupt. (See note 3, ch. lii.)

NOTE 2.—MIEN is the name by which the kingdom of Burma or Ava was and is known to the Chinese. M. Garnier informs me that Mien-Kwé or Mien-tisong is the name always given in Yun-nan to that kingdom, whilst the Shans at Kiang Hung call the Burmese Man (pronounced like the English word).

The title given to the sovereign in question of King of BENGAL, as well as of Mien, is very remarkable. We shall see reason hereafter to conceive that Polo did more or less confound Bengal with Pegu, which was subject to the Burmese monarchy up to the time of the Mongol invasion. But apart from any such misapprehension, there is not only evidence of rather close relations between Burma and Gangetic India in the ages immediately preceding that of our author, but also some ground for believing that he may be right in his representation, and that the King of Burma may have at this time arrogated the title of “King of Bengal,” which is attributed to him in the text.

Anaurahta, one of the most powerful kings in Burmese history (1017–1059), extended his conquests to the frontiers of India, and is stated to have set up images within that country. He also married an Indian princess, the daughter of the King of Wethali (i.e. Vaiçali in Tirhút).

There is also in the Burmese Chronicle a somewhat confused story regarding a succeeding king, Kyan-tsittha (A.D. 1064), who desired to marry his daughter to the son of the King of Patteik-Kará, a part of Bengal.[1] The marriage was objected to by the Burmese nobles, but the princess was already with child by the Bengal prince; and their son eventually succeeded to the Burmese throne under the name of Alaungtsi-thu. When king, he travelled all over his dominions, and visited the images which Anaurahta had set up in India. He also maintained intercourse with the King of Patteik-Kará and married his daughter. Alaungtsi-thu is stated to have lived to the age of 101 years, and to have reigned 75. Even then his death was hastened by his son Narathu, who smothered him in the temple called Shwé-Ku (“Golden Cave”), at Pagán, and also put to death his Bengali step-mother. The father of the latter sent eight brave men, disguised as Brahmans, to avenge his daughter’s death. Having got access to the royal presence through their sacred character, they slew King Narathu and then themselves. Hence King Narathu is known in the Burmese history as the Kalá-Ḳya Meng, or “King slain by the Hindus.” He was building the great Temple at Pagán called Dhammayangyi, at the time of his death, which occurred about the year 1171. The great-grandson of this king was Narathihapade (presumably Narasinha-pati), the king reigning at the time of the Mongol invasion.

All these circumstances show tolerably close relations between Burma and Bengal, and also that the dynasty then reigning in Burma was descended from a Bengal stock. Sir Arthur Phayre, after noting these points, remarks: “From all these circumstances, and from the conquests attributed to Anaurahta, it is very probable that, after the conquest of Bengal by the Mahomedans in the 13th century, the kings of Burma would assume the title of Kings of Bengal. This is nowhere expressly stated in the Burmese history, but the course of events renders it very probable. We know that the claim to Bengal was asserted by the kings of Burma in long after years. In the Journal of the Marquis of Hastings, under the date of 6th September, 1818, is the following passage: ‘The king of Burma favoured us early this year with the obliging requisition that we should cede to him Moorshedabad and the provinces to the east of it, which he deigned to say were all natural dependencies of his throne.’ And at the time of the disputes on the frontier of Arakan, in 1823–1824, which led to the war of the two following years, the Governor of Arakan made a similar demand. We may therefore reasonably conclude that at the close of the 13th century of the Christian era the kings of Pagán called themselves kings of Burma and of Bengala.” (MS. Note by Sir Arthur Phayre; see also his paper in J. A. S. B. vol. XXXVII. part I.)

NOTE 3.—It is very difficult to know what to make of the repeated assertions of old writers as to the numbers of men carried by war-elephants, or, if we could admit those numbers, to conceive how the animal could have carried the enormous structure necessary to give them space to use their weapons. The Third Book of Maccabees is the most astounding in this way, alleging that a single elephant carried 32 stout men, besides the Indian Mahaut. Bochart indeed supposes the number here to be a clerical error for 12, but this would even be extravagant. Friar Jordanus is, no doubt, building on the Maccabees rather than on his own Oriental experience when he says that the elephant “carrieth easily more than 30 men.” Philostratus, in his Life of Apollonius, speaks of 10 to 15; Ibn Batuta of about 20; and a great elephant sent by Timur to the Sultan of Egypt is said to have carried 20 drummers. Christopher Borri says that in Cochin China the elephant did ordinarily carry 13 or 14 persons, 6 on each side in two tiers of 3 each, and 2 behind. On the other hand, among the ancients, Strabo and Aelian speak of three soldiers only in addition to the driver, and Livy, describing the Battle of Magnesia, of four. These last are reasonable statements.

(Bochart, Hierozoicon, ed. 3rd, p. 266; Jord., p. 26; Philost. trad. par A. Chassaing, liv. II. c. ii.; Ibn Bat. II. 223; N. and E. XIV. 510; Cochin China, etc., London, 1633, ed. 3; Armandi, Hist. Militaire des Eléphants, 259 seqq. 442.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Sir A. Phayre thinks this may have been Vikrampúr, for some time the capital of Eastern Bengal before the Mahomedan conquest. Vikrampúr was some miles east of Dacca, and the dynasty in question was that called Vaidya. (See Lassen, III. 749.) Patteik-Kará is apparently an attempt to represent some Hindi name such as Patthargarh, “The Stone-Fort.”

Chapter LII

OF THE BATTLE THAT WAS FOUGHT BY THE GREAT KAAN’S HOST AND HIS SENESCHAL, AGAINST THE KING OF MIEN.

And when the Captain of the Tartar host had certain news that the king aforesaid was coming against him with so great a force, he waxed uneasy, seeing that he had with him but 12,000 horsemen. Natheless he was a most valiant and able soldier, of great experience in arms and an excellent Captain; and his name was NESCRADIN.{1} His troops too were very good, and he gave them very particular orders and cautions how to act, and took every measure for his own defence and that of his army. And why should I make a long story of it? The whole force of the Tartars, consisting of 12,000 well-mounted horsemen, advanced to receive the enemy in the Plain of Vochan, and there they waited to give them battle. And this they did through the good judgment of the excellent Captain who led them; for hard by that plain was a great wood, thick with trees. And so there in the plain the Tartars awaited their foe. Let us then leave discoursing of them a while; we shall come back to them presently; but meantime let us speak of the enemy.

After the King of Mien had halted long enough to refresh his troops, he resumed his march, and came to the Plain of Vochan, where the Tartars were already in order of battle. And when the king’s army had arrived in the plain, and was within a mile of the enemy, he caused all the castles that were on the elephants to be ordered for battle, and the fighting-men to take up their posts on them, and he arrayed his horse and his foot with all skill, like a wise king as he was. And when he had completed all his arrangements he began to advance to engage the enemy. The Tartars, seeing the foe advance, showed no dismay, but came on likewise with good order and discipline to meet them. And when they were near and nought remained but to begin the fight, the horses of the Tartars took such fright at the sight of the elephants that they could not be got to face the foe, but always swerved and turned back; whilst all the time the king and his forces, and all his elephants, continued to advance upon them.{2}

And when the Tartars perceived how the case stood, they were in great wrath, and wist not what to say or do; for well enough they saw that unless they could get their horses to advance, all would be lost. But their Captain acted like a wise leader who had considered everything beforehand. He immediately gave orders that every man should dismount and tie his horse to the trees of the forest that stood hard by, and that then they should take to their bows, a weapon that they know how to handle better than any troops in the world. They did as he bade them, and plied their bows stoutly, shooting so many shafts at the advancing elephants that in a short space they had wounded or slain the greater part of them as well as of the men they carried. The enemy also shot at the Tartars, but the Tartars had the better weapons, and were the better archers to boot.

And what shall I tell you? Understand that when the elephants felt the smart of those arrows that pelted them like rain, they turned tail and fled, and nothing on earth would have induced them to turn and face the Tartars. So off they sped with such a noise and uproar that you would have trowed the world was coming to an end! And then too they plunged into the wood and rushed this way and that, dashing their castles against the trees, bursting their harness and smashing and destroying everything that was on them.

So when the Tartars saw that the elephants had turned tail and could not be brought to face the fight again, they got to horse at once and charged the enemy. And then the battle began to rage furiously with sword and mace. Right fiercely did the two hosts rush together, and deadly were the blows exchanged. The king’s troops were far more in number than the Tartars, but they were not of such metal, nor so inured to war; otherwise the Tartars who were so few in number could never have stood against them. Then might you see swashing blows dealt and taken from sword and mace; then might you see knights and horses and men-at-arms go down; then might you see arms and hands and legs and heads hewn off: and besides the dead that fell, many a wounded man, that never rose again, for the sore press there was. The din and uproar were so great from this side and from that, that God might have thundered and no man would have heard it! Great was the medley, and dire and parlous was the fight that was fought on both sides; but the Tartars had the best of it.{3}

In an ill hour indeed, for the king and his people, was that battle begun, so many of them were slain therein. And when they had continued fighting till midday the king’s troops could stand against the Tartars no longer; but felt that they were defeated, and turned and fled. And when the Tartars saw them routed they gave chase, and hacked and slew so mercilessly that it was a piteous sight to see. But after pursuing a while they gave up, and returned to the wood to catch the elephants that had run away, and to manage this they had to cut down great trees to bar their passage. Even then they would not have been able to take them without the help of the king’s own men who had been taken, and who knew better how to deal with the beasts than the Tartars did. The elephant is an animal that hath more wit than any other; but in this way at last they were caught, more than 200 of them. And it was from this time forth that the Great Kaan began to keep numbers of elephants.

So thus it was that the king aforesaid was defeated by the sagacity and superior skill of the Tartars as you have heard.

NOTE 1.—Nescradin for Nesradin, as we had Bascra for Basra.

This NÁSRUDDIN was apparently an officer of whom Rashiduddin speaks, and whom he calls governor (or perhaps commander) in Karájáng. He describes him as having succeeded in that command to his father the Sayad Ajil of Bokhara, one of the best of Kúblái’s chief Ministers. Nasr-uddin retained his position in Yun-nan till his death, which Rashid, writing about 1300, says occurred five or six years before. His son Bayan, who also bore the grandfather’s title of Sayad Ajil, was Minister of Finance under Kúblái’s successor; and another son, Ḥálá, is also mentioned as one of the governors of the province of Fu-chau. (See Cathay, pp. 265, 268, and D’Ohsson, II. 507–508.)

Nasr-uddin (Nasulating) is also frequently mentioned as employed on this frontier by the Chinese authorities whom Pauthier cites.

[Na-su-la-ding [Nasr-uddin] was the eldest of the five sons of the Mohammedan Sai-dien-ch’i shan-sze-ding, Sayad Ajil, a native of Bokhara, who died in Yun-nan, where he had been governor when Kúblái, in the reign of Mangu, entered the country. Nasr-uddin “has a separate biography in ch. cxxv of the Yuen-shi. He was governor of the province of Yun-nan, and distinguished himself in the war against the southern tribes of Kiao-chi (Cochin-China) and Mien (Burma). He died in 1292, the father of twelve sons, the names of five of which are given in the biography, viz. Bo-yen-ch’a-rh [Bayan], who held a high office, Omar, Djafar, Hussein, and Saadi.” (Bretschneider, Med. Res. I. 270–271). Mr. E. H. Parker writes in the China Review, February–March, 1901, pp. 196–197, that the Mongol history states that amongst the reforms of Nasr-uddin’s father in Yun-nan, was the introduction of coffins for the dead, instead of burning them.—H. C.]

[NOTE 2.—In his battle near Sardis, Cyrus “collected together all the camels that had come in the train of his army to carry the provisions and the baggage, and taking off their loads, he mounted riders upon them accoutred as horsemen. These he commanded to advance in front of his other troops against the Lydian horse.... The reason why Cyrus opposed his camels to the enemy’s horse was, because the horse has a natural dread of the camel, and cannot abide either the sight or the smell of that animal.... The two armies then joined battle, and immediately the Lydian war-horses, seeing and smelling the camels, turned round and galloped off.” (Herodotus, Bk. I. i. p. 220, Rawlinson’s ed.)—H. C.]

NOTE 3.—We are indebted to Pauthier for very interesting illustrations of this narrative from the Chinese Annalists (p. 410 seqq.). These latter fix the date to the year 1277, and it is probable that the 1272 or MCCLXXII of the Texts was a clerical error for MCCLXXVII. The Annalists describe the people of Mien as irritated at calls upon them to submit to the Mongols (whose power they probably did not appreciate, as their descendants did not appreciate the British power in 1824), and as crossing the frontier of Yung-ch’ang to establish fortified posts. The force of Mien, they say, amounted to 50,000 men, with 800 elephants and 10,000 horses, whilst the Mongol Chief had but seven hundred men. “When the elephants felt the arrows (of the Mongols) they turned tail and fled with the platforms on their backs into a place that was set thickly with sharp bamboo-stakes, and these their riders laid hold of to prick them with.” This threw the Burmese army into confusion; they fled, and were pursued with great slaughter.

The Chinese author does not mention Nasr-uddin in connection with this battle. He names as the chief of the Mongol force Huthukh (Kutuka?), commandant of Ta-li fu. Nasr-uddin is mentioned as advancing, a few months later (about December, 1277), with nearly 4000 men to Kiangtheu (which appears to have been on the Irawadi, somewhere near Bhamó, and is perhaps the Kaungtaung of the Burmese), but effecting little (p. 415).

[I have published in the Rev. Ext. Orient, II. 72–88, from the British Museum Add. MS. 16913, the translation by Mgr. Visdelou, of Chinese documents relating to the Kingdom of Mien and the wars of Kúblái; the battle won by Hu-tu, commandant of Ta-li, was fought during the 3rd month of the 14th year (1277). (Cf. Pauthier, supra.)—H. C.]

These affairs of the battle in the Yung-ch’ang territory, and the advance of Nasr-uddin to the Irawadi are, as Polo clearly implies in the beginning of ch. li., quite distinct from the invasion and conquest of Mien some years later, of which he speaks in ch. liv. They are not mentioned in the Burmese Annals at all.

Sir Arthur Phayre is inclined to reject altogether the story of the battle near Yung-ch’ang in consequence of this absence from the Burmese Chronicle, and of its inconsistency with the purely defensive character which that record assigns to the action of the Burmese Government in regard to China at this time. With the strongest respect for my friend’s opinion I feel it impossible to assent to this. We have not only the concurrent testimony of Marco and of the Chinese Official Annals of the Mongol Dynasty to the facts of the Burmese provocation and of the engagement within the Yung-ch’ang or Vochan territory, but we have in the Chinese narrative a consistent chronology and tolerably full detail of the relations between the two countries.

[Baber writes (p. 173): “Biot has it that Yung-ch’ang was first established by the Mings, long subsequent to the time of Marco’s visit, but the name was well known much earlier. The mention by Marco of the Plain of Vochan (Unciam would be a perfect reading), as if it were a plain par excellence, is strikingly consistent with the position of the city on the verge of the largest plain west of Yünnan-fu. Hereabouts was fought the great battle between the ‘valiant soldier and the excellent captain Nescradin,’ with his 12,000 well-mounted Tartars, against the King of Burmah and a large army, whose strength lay in 2000 elephants, on each of which was set a tower of timber full of well-armed fighting men.

“There is no reason to suppose this ‘dire and parlous fight’ to be mythical, apart from the consistency of annals adduced by Colonel Yule; the local details of the narrative, particularly the prominent importance of the wood as an element of the Tartar success, are convincing. It seems to have been the first occasion on which the Mongols engaged a large body of elephants, and this, no doubt, made the victory memorable.

“Marco informs us that ‘from this time forth the Great Khan began to keep numbers of elephants.’ It is obvious that cavalry could not manœuvre in a morass such as fronts the city. Let us refer to the account of the battle.

“‘The Great Khan’s host was at Yung-ch’ang, from which they advanced into the plain, and there waited to give battle. This they did through the good judgment of the captain, for hard by that plain was a great wood thick with trees.’ The general’s purpose was more probably to occupy the dry undulating slopes near the south end of the valley. An advance of about five miles would have brought him to that position. The statement that ‘the King’s army arrived in the plain, and was within a mile of the enemy,’ would then accord perfectly with the conditions of the ground. The Burmese would have found themselves at about that distance from their foes as soon as they were fairly in the plain.

“The trees ‘hard by the plain,’ to which the Tartars tied their horses, and in which the elephants were entangled, were in all probability in the corner below the ‘rolling hills’ marked in the chart. Very few trees remain, but in any case the grove would long ago have been cut down by the Chinese, as everywhere on inhabited plains. A short distance up the hill, however, groves of exceptionally fine trees are passed. The army, as it seems to us, must have entered the plain from its southernmost point. The route by which we departed on our way to Burmah would be very embarrassing, though perhaps not utterly impossible, for so great a number of elephants.”—H. C.]

Between 1277 and the end of the century the Chinese Annals record three campaigns or expeditions against MIEN; viz. (1) that which Marco has related in this chapter; (2) that which he relates in ch. liv.; and (3) one undertaken in 1300 at the request of the son of the legitimate Burmese King, who had been put to death by an usurper. The Burmese Annals mention only the two latest, but, concerning both the date and the main circumstances of these two, Chinese and Burmese Annals are in almost entire agreement. Surely then it can scarcely be doubted that the Chinese authority is amply trustworthy for the first campaign also, respecting which the Burmese book is silent; even were the former not corroborated by the independent authority of Marco.

Indeed the mutual correspondence of these Annals, especially as to chronology, is very remarkable, and is an argument for greater respect to the chronological value of the Burmese Chronicle and other Indo-Chinese records of like character than we should otherwise be apt to entertain. Compare the story of the expedition of 1300 as told after the Chinese Annals by De Mailla, and after the Burmese Chronicle by Burney and Phayre. (See De Mailla, IX. 476 seqq.; and J. A. S. B. vol. vi. pp. 121–122, and vol. xxxvii. Pt. I. pp. 102 and 110.)

Chapter LIII

OF THE GREAT DESCENT THAT LEADS TOWARDS THE KINGDOM OF MIEN.

After leaving the Province of which I have been speaking you come to a great Descent. In fact you ride for two days and a half continually down hill. On all this descent there is nothing worthy of mention except only that there is a large place there where occasionally a great market is held; for all the people of the country round come thither on fixed days, three times a week, and hold a market there. They exchange gold for silver; for they have gold in abundance; and they give one weight of fine gold for five weights of fine silver; so this induces merchants to come from various quarters bringing silver which they exchange for gold with these people; and in this way the merchants make great gain. As regards those people of the country who dispose of gold so cheaply, you must understand that nobody is acquainted with their places of abode, for they dwell in inaccessible positions, in sites so wild and strong that no one can get at them to meddle with them. Nor will they allow anybody to accompany them so as to gain a knowledge of their abodes.{1}

After you have ridden those two days and a half down hill, you find yourself in a province towards the south which is pretty near to India, and this province is called AMIEN. You travel therein for fifteen days through a very unfrequented country, and through great woods abounding in elephants and unicorns and numbers of other wild beasts. There are no dwellings and no people, so we need say no more of this wild country, for in sooth there is nothing to tell. But I have a story to relate which you shall now hear{2}.

NOTE 1.—In all the Shan towns visited by Major Sladen on this frontier he found markets held every fifth day. This custom, he says, is borrowed from China, and is general throughout Western Yun-nan. There seem to be traces of this five-day week over Indo-China, and it is found in Java; as it is in Mexico. The Kakhyens attend in great crowds. They do not now bring gold for sale to Momein, though it is found to some extent in their hills, more especially in the direction of Mogaung, whence it is exported towards Assam.

Major Sladen saw a small quantity of nuggets in the possession of a Kakhyen who had brought them from a hill two days north of Bhamó. (MS. Notes by Major Sladen.)

NOTE 2.—I confess that the indications in this and the beginning of the following chapter are, to me, full of difficulty. According to the general style of Polo’s itinerary, the 2½ days should be reckoned from Yung-ch’ang; the distance therefore to the capital city of Mien would be 17½ days. The real capital of Mien or Burma at this time was, however, Pagán, in lat. 21° 13′, and that city could hardly have been reached by a land traveller in any such time. We shall see that something may be said in behalf of the supposition that the point reached was Tagaung or Old Pagán, on the upper Irawadi, in lat. 23° 28′; and there was perhaps some confusion in the traveller’s mind between this and the great city. The descent might then be from Yung-ch’ang to the valley of the Shwéli, and that valley then followed to the Irawadi. Taking as a scale Polo’s 5 marches from Tali to Yung-ch’ang, I find we should by this route make just about 17 marches from Yung-ch’ang to Tagaung. We have no detailed knowledge of the route, but there is a road that way, and by no other does the plain country approach so near to Yung-ch’ang. (See Anderson’s Report on Expedition to Western Yunnan, p. 160.)

Dr. Anderson’s remarks on the present question do not in my opinion remove the difficulties. He supposes the long descent to be the descent into the plains of the Irawadi near Bhamo; and from that point the land journey to Great Pagán could, he conceives, “easily be accomplished in 15 days.” I greatly doubt the latter assumption. By the scale I have just referred to it would take at least 20 days. And to calculate the 2½ days with which the journey commences from an indefinite point seems scarcely admissible. Polo is giving us a continuous itinerary; it would be ruptured if he left an indefinite distance between his last station and his “long descent.” And if the same principle were applied to the 5 days between Carajan (or Tali) and Vochan (Yung-ch’ang), the result would be nonsense.

[Mien-tien, to which is devoted ch. vii. of the Chinese work Sze-i-kwan-k’ao, appears to have included much more than Burma proper. (See the passage supra, pp. 70–71, quoted by Devéria from the Yuen-shi lei pien regarding Kien-tou and Kin-Chi.)—H. C.]

The hypothesis that I have suggested would suit better with the traveller’s representation of the country traversed as wild and uninhabited. In a journey to Great Pagán the most populous and fertile part of Burma would be passed through.

[Baber writes (p. 180): “The generally received theory that ‘the great descent which leads towards the Kingdom of Mien,’ on which ‘you ride for two days and a half continually downhill,’ was the route from Yung-ch’ang to T’eng-Yueh, must be at once abandoned. Marco was, no doubt, speaking from hearsay, or rather, from a recollection of hearsay, as it does not appear that he possessed any notes; but there is good reason for supposing that he had personally visited Yung-ch’ang. Weary of the interminable mountain-paths, and encumbered with much baggage—for a magnate of Marco’s court influence could never, in the East, have travelled without a considerable state—impeded, in addition, by a certain quantity of merchandise, for he was ‘discreet and prudent in every way,’ he would have listened longingly to the report of an easy ride of two and a half days downhill, and would never have forgotten it. That such a route exists I am well satisfied. Where is it? The stream which drains the Yung-ch’ang plain communicates with the Salwen by a river called the ‘Nan-tien,’ not to be confounded with the ‘Nan-ting,’ about 45 miles south of that city, a fair journey of two and a half days. Knowing, as we now do, that it must descend some 3500 feet in that distance, does it not seem reasonable to suppose that the valley of this rivulet is the route alluded to? The great battle on the Yung-ch’ang plain, moreover, was fought only a few years before Marco’s visit, and seeing that the king and his host of elephants in all probability entered the valley from the south, travellers to Burma would naturally have quitted it by the same route.

“But again, our mediæval Herodotus reports that ‘the country is wild and hard of access, full of great woods and mountains which ’tis impossible to pass, the air is so impure and unwholesome; and any foreigners attempting it would die for certain.’

“This is exactly and literally the description given us of the district in which we crossed the Salwen.

“To insist on the theory of the descent by this route is to make the traveller ride downhill, ‘over mountains it is impossible to pass.’

“The fifteen days’ subsequent journey described by Marco need not present much difficulty. The distance from the junction of the Nan-tien with the Salwen to the capital of Burma (Pagán) would be something over 300 miles; fifteen days seems a fair estimate for the distance, seeing that a great part of the journey would doubtless be by boat.”

Regarding this last paragraph, Captain Gill says (II. 345): “An objection may be raised that no such route as this is known to exist; but it must be remembered that the Burmese capital changes its position every now and then, and it is obvious that the trade routes would be directed to the capital, and would change with it. Altogether, with the knowledge at present available, this certainly seems the most satisfactory interpretation of the old traveller’s story.”—H. C.]

Chapter LIV

CONCERNING THE CITY OF MIEN, AND THE TWO TOWERS THAT ARE THEREIN, ONE OF GOLD AND THE OTHER OF SILVER.

And when you have travelled those 15 days through such a difficult country as I have described, in which travellers have to carry provisions for the road because there are no inhabitants, then you arrive at the capital city of this Province of Mien, and it also is called AMIEN, and is a very great and noble city.{1} The people are Idolaters and have a peculiar language, and are subject to the Great Kaan.

And in this city there is a thing so rich and rare that I must tell you about it. You see there was in former days a rich and puissant king in this city, and when he was about to die he commanded that by his tomb they should erect two towers [one at either end], one of gold and the other of silver, in such fashion as I shall tell you. The towers are built of fine stone; and then one of them has been covered with gold a good finger in thickness, so that the tower looks as if it were all of solid gold; and the other is covered with silver in like manner so that it seems to be all of solid silver. Each tower is a good ten paces in height and of breadth in proportion. The upper part of these towers is round, and girt all about with bells, the top of the gold tower with gilded bells and the silver tower with silvered bells, insomuch that whenever the wind blows among these bells they tinkle. [The tomb likewise was plated partly with gold, and partly with silver.] The King caused these towers to be erected to commemorate his magnificence and for the good of his soul; and really they do form one of the finest sights in the world; so exquisitely finished are they, so splendid and costly. And when they are lighted up by the sun they shine most brilliantly and are visible from a vast distance.

Now you must know that the Great Kaan conquered the country in this fashion.

You see at the Court of the Great Kaan there was a great number of gleemen and jugglers; and he said to them one day that he wanted them to go and conquer the aforesaid province of Mien, and that he would give them a good Captain to lead them and other good aid. And they replied that they would be delighted. So the Emperor caused them to be fitted out with all that an army requires, and gave them a Captain and a body of men-at-arms to help them; and so they set out, and marched until they came to the country and province of Mien. And they did conquer the whole of it! And when they found in the city the two towers of gold and silver of which I have been telling you, they were greatly astonished, and sent word thereof to the Great Kaan, asking what he would have them do with the two towers, seeing what a great quantity of wealth there was upon them. And the Great Kaan, being well aware that the King had caused these towers to be made for the good of his soul, and to preserve his memory after his death, said that he would not have them injured, but would have them left precisely as they were. And that was no wonder either, for you must know that no Tartar in the world will ever, if he can help it, lay hand on anything appertaining to the dead.{2}

They have in this province numbers of elephants and wild oxen;{3} also beautiful stags and deer and roe, and other kinds of large game in plenty.

Now having told you about the province of Mien, I will tell you about another province which is called Bangala, as you shall hear presently.

NOTE 1.—The name of the city appears as Amien both in Pauthier’s text here, and in the G. Text in the preceding chapter. In the Bern MS. it is Aamien. Perhaps some form like Amien was that used by the Mongols and Persians. I fancy it may be traced in the Arman or Uman of Rashiduddin, probably corrupt readings (in Elliot I. 72).

NOTE 2.—M. Pauthier’s extracts are here again very valuable. We gather from them that the first Mongol communication with the King of Mien or Burma took place in 1271, when the Commandant of Tali-fu sent a deputation to that sovereign to demand an acknowledgment of the supremacy of the Emperor. This was followed by various negotiations and acts of offence on both sides, which led to the campaign of 1277, already spoken of. For a few years no further events appear to be recorded, but in 1282, in consequence of a report from Násruddin of the ease with which Mien could be conquered, an invasion was ordered under a Prince of the Blood called Siangtaur [called Siam-ghu-talh, by Visdelou.—H. C.]. This was probably Singtur, great-grandson of one of the brothers of Chinghiz, who a few years later took part in the insurrection of Nayan. (See D’Ohsson, II. 461.) The army started from Yun-nan fu, then called Chung-khing (and the Yachi of Polo) in the autumn of 1283. We are told that the army made use of boats to descend the River Oho to the fortified city of Kiangtheu (see supra, note 3, ch. lii.), which they took and sacked; and as the King still refused to submit, they then advanced to the “primitive capital,” Taikung, which they captured. Here Pauthier’s details stop. (Pp. 405, 416; see also D’Ohsson, II. 444 [and Visdelou].)

It is curious to compare these narratives with that from the Burmese Royal Annals given by Colonel Burney, and again by Sir A. Phayre in the J. A. S. B. (IV. 401, and XXXVII. Pt. I. p. 101.) Those annals afford no mention of transactions with the Mongols previous to 1281. In that year they relate that a mission of ten nobles and 1000 horse came from the Emperor to demand gold and silver vessels as symbols of homage on the ground of an old precedent. The envoys conducted themselves disrespectfully (the tradition was that they refused to take off their boots, an old grievance at the Burmese court), and the King put them all to death. The Emperor of course was very wroth, and sent an army of 6,000,000 of horse and 20,000,000 of foot (!) to invade Burma. The Burmese generals had their point d’appui at the city of Nga-tshaung-gyan, apparently somewhere near the mouth of the Bhamó River, and after a protracted resistance on that river, they were obliged to retire. They took up a new point of defence on the Hill of Malé, which they had fortified. Here a decisive battle was fought, and the Burmese were entirely routed. The King, on hearing of their retreat from Bhamó, at first took measures for fortifying his capital Pagán, and destroyed 6000 temples of various sizes to furnish material. But after all he lost heart, and embarking with his treasure and establishments on the Irawadi, fled down that river to Bassein in the Delta. The Chinese continued the pursuit long past Pagán till they reached the place now called Tarokmau or “Chinese Point,” 30 miles below Prome. Here they were forced by want of provisions to return. The Burmese Annals place the abandonment of Pagán by the King in 1284, a most satisfactory synchronism with the Chinese record. It is a notable point in Burmese history, for it marked the fall of an ancient Dynasty which was speedily followed by its extinction, and the abandonment of the capital. The King is known in the Burmese Annals as Tarok-pyé-Meng, “The King who fled from the Tarok.”[1]

In Dr. Mason’s abstract of the Pegu Chronicle we find the notable statement with reference to this period that “the Emperor of China, having subjugated Pagán, his troops with the Burmese entered Pegu and invested several cities.”

We see that the Chinese Annals, as quoted, mention only the “capitale primitive” Taikung, which I have little doubt Pauthier is right in identifying with Tagaung, traditionally the most ancient royal city of Burma, and the remains of which stand side by side with those of Old Pagán, a later but still very ancient capital, on the east bank of the Irawadi, in about lat. 23° 28′. The Chinese extracts give no idea of the temporary completeness of the conquest, nor do they mention Great Pagán (lat. 21° 13′), a city whose vast remains I have endeavoured partially to describe.[2] Sir Arthur Phayre, from a careful perusal of the Burmese Chronicle, assures me that there can be no doubt that this was at the time in question the Burmese Royal Residence, and the city alluded to in the Burmese narrative. M. Pauthier is mistaken in supposing that Tarok-Mau, the turning-point of the Chinese Invasion, lay north of this city: he has not unnaturally confounded it with Tarok-Myo or “China-Town,” a district not far below Ava. Moreover Malé, the position of the decisive victory of the Chinese, is itself much to the south of Tagaung (about 22° 55′).

Both Pagán and Malé are mentioned in a remarkable Chinese notice extracted in Amyot’s Mémoires (XIV. 292): “Mien-Tien ... had five chief towns, of which the first was Kiangtheu (supra, pp. 105, 111), the second Taikung, the third Malai, the fourth Ngan-cheng-kwé (? perhaps the Nga-tshaung gyan of the Burmese Annals), the fifth PUKAN MIEN-WANG (Pagán of the Mien King?). The Yuen carried war into this country, particularly during the reign of Shun-Ti, the last Mongol Emperor [1333–1368], who, after subjugating it, erected at Pukan Mien-Wang a tribunal styled Hwen-wei-she-sé, the authority of which extended over Pang-ya and all its dependencies.” This is evidently founded on actual documents, for Panya or Pengya, otherwise styled Vijáyapúra, was the capital of Burma during part of the 14th century, between the decay of Pagán and the building of Ava. But none of the translated extracts from the Burmese Chronicle afford corroboration. From Sangermano’s abstract, however, we learn that the King of Panya from 1323 to 1343 was the son of a daughter of the Emperor of China (p. 42). I may also refer to Pemberton’s abstract of the Chronicle of the Shan State of Pong in the Upper Irawadi valley, which relates that about the middle of the 14th century the Chinese invaded Pong and took Maung Maorong, the capital.[3] The Shan King and his son fled to the King of Burma for protection, but the Burmese surrendered them and they were carried to China. (Report on E. Frontier of Bengal, p. 112.)

I see no sufficient evidence as to whether Marco himself visited the “city of Mien.” I think it is quite clear that his account of the conquest is from the merest hearsay, not to say gossip. Of the absurd story of the jugglers we find no suggestion in the Chinese extracts. We learn from them that Násruddin had represented the conquest of Mien as a very easy task, and Kúblái may have in jest asked his gleemen if they would undertake it. The haziness of Polo’s account of the conquest contrasts strongly with his graphic description of the rout of the elephants at Vochan. Of the latter he heard the particulars on the spot (I conceive) shortly after the event; whilst the conquest took place some years later than his mission to that frontier. His description of the gold and silver pagodas with their canopies of tinkling bells (the Burmese Htí), certainly looks like a sketch from the life;[4] and it is quite possible that some negotiations between 1277 and 1281 may have given him the opportunity of visiting Burma, though he may not have reached the capital. Indeed he would in that case surely have given a distincter account of so important a city, the aspect of which in its glory we have attempted to realize in the plate of “the city of Mien.”

It is worthy of note that the unfortunate King then reigning in Pagán, had in 1274 finished a magnificent Pagoda called Mengala-dzedi (Mangala Chaitya) respecting which ominous prophecies had been diffused. In this pagoda were deposited, besides holy relics, golden images of the Disciples of Buddha, golden models of the holy places, golden images of the King’s fifty-one predecessors in Pagán, and of the King and his Family. It is easy to suspect a connection of this with Marco’s story. “It is possible that the King’s ashes may have been intended to be buried near those relics, though such is not now the custom; and Marco appears to have confounded the custom of depositing relics of Buddha and ancient holy men in pagodas with the supposed custom of the burial of the dead. Still, even now, monuments are occasionally erected over the dead in Burma, although the practice is considered a vain folly. I have known a miniature pagoda with a hti complete, erected over the ashes of a favourite disciple by a P’hungyi or Buddhist monk.” The latter practice is common in China. (Notes by Sir A. Phayre; J. A. S. B. IV. u.s., also V. 164, VI. 251; Mason’s Burmah, 2nd ed. p. 26; Milne’s Life in China, pp. 288, 450.)

NOTE 3.—The Gaur—Bos Gaurus, or B. (Bibos) Cavifrons of Hodgson—exists in certain forests of the Burmese territory; and, in the south at least, a wild ox nearer the domestic species, Bos Sondaicus. Mr. Gouger, in his book The Prisoner in Burma, describes the rare spectacle which he once enjoyed in the Tenasserim forests of a herd of wild cows at graze. He speaks of them as small and elegant, without hump, and of a light reddish dun colour (pp. 326–327).

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] This is the name now applied in Burma to the Chinese. Sir A. Phayre supposes it to be Túrk, in which case its use probably began at this time.

[2] In the Narrative of Phayre’s Mission, ch. ii.Return to passage

[3] Dr. Anderson has here hastily assumed a discrepancy of sixty years between the chronology of the Shan document and that of the Chinese Annals. But this is merely because he arbitrarily identifies the Chinese invasion here recorded with that of Kúblái in the preceding century. (See Anderson’s Western Yunnan, p. 8.) We see in the quotation above from Amyot that the Chinese Annals also contain an obscure indication of the later invasion.Return to passage

[4] Compare the old Chinese Pilgrims Hwui Seng and Seng Yun, in their admiration of a vast pagoda erected by the great King Kanishka in Gandhára (at Peshawur in fact): “At sunrise the gilded disks of the vane are lit up with dazzling glory, whilst the gentle breeze of morning causes the precious bells to tinkle with a pleasing sound.” (Beal, p. 204.)Return to passage

LV. CONCERNING THE PROVINCE OF BANGALA

Bangala is a Province towards the south, which up to the year 1290, when the aforesaid Messer Marco Polo was still at the Court of the Great Kaan, had not yet been conquered; but his armies had gone thither to make the conquest. You must know that this province has a peculiar language, and that the people are wretched Idolaters. They are tolerably close to India. There are numbers of eunuchs there, insomuch that all the Barons who keep them get them from that Province.{1}

The people have oxen as tall as elephants, but not so big.{2} They live on flesh and milk and rice. They grow cotton, in which they drive a great trade, and also spices such as spikenard, galingale, ginger, sugar, and many other sorts. And the people of India also come thither in search of the eunuchs that I mentioned, and of slaves, male and female, of which there are great numbers, taken from other provinces with which those of the country are at war; and these eunuchs and slaves are sold to the Indian and other merchants who carry them thence for sale about the world.

There is nothing more to mention about this country, so we will quit it, and I will tell you of another province called Caugigu.

NOTE 1.—I do not think it probable that Marco even touched at any port of Bengal on that mission to the Indian Seas of which we hear in the prologue; but he certainly never reached it from the Yun-nan side, and he had, as we shall presently see (infra, ch. lix. note 6), a wrong notion as to its position. Indeed, if he had visited it at all, he would have been aware that it was essentially a part of India, whilst in fact he evidently regarded it as an Indo-Chinese region, like Zardandan, Mien, and Caugigu.

There is no notice, I believe, in any history, Indian or Chinese, of an attempt by Kúblái to conquer Bengal. The only such attempt by the Mongols that we hear of is one mentioned by Firishta, as made by way of Cathay and Tibet, during the reign of Aláuddin Masa’úd, king of Delhi, in 1244, and stated to have been defeated by the local officers in Bengal. But Mr. Edward Thomas tells me he has most distinctly ascertained that this statement, which has misled every historian “from Badauni and Firishtah to Briggs and Elphinstone, is founded purely on an erroneous reading” (and see a note in Mr. Thomas’s Pathan Kings of Dehli, p. 121).

The date 1290 in the text would fix the period of Polo’s final departure from Peking, if the dates were not so generally corrupt.

The subject of the last part of this paragraph, recurred to in the next, has been misunderstood and corrupted in Pauthier’s text, and partially in Ramusio’s. These make the escuillés or escoilliez (vide Ducange in v. Escodatus, and Raynouard, Lex. Rom. VI. 11) into scholars and what not. But on comparison of the passages in those two editions with the Geographic Text one cannot doubt the correct reading. As to the fact that Bengal had an evil notoriety for this traffic, especially the province of Silhet, see the Ayeen Akbery, II. 9–11, _Barbosa’s _chapter on Bengal, and De Barros (Ramusio I. 316 and 391).

On the cheapness of slaves in Bengal, see Ibn Batuta, IV. 211–212. He says people from Persia used to call Bengal Dúzakh pur-i ni’amat, “a hell crammed with good things,” an appellation perhaps provoked by the official style often applied to it of Jannat-ul-balád or “Paradise of countries.”

Professor H. Blochmann, who is, in admirable essays, redeeming the long neglect of the history and archæology of Bengal Proper by our own countrymen, says that one of the earliest passages, in which the name Bangálah occurs, is in a poem of Hafiz, sent from Shiraz to Sultan Ghiássuddín, who reigned in Bengal from 1367 to 1373. Its occurrence in our text, however, shows that the name was in use among the Mahomedan foreigners (from whom Polo derived his nomenclature) nearly a century earlier. And in fact it occurs (though corruptly in some MSS.) in the history of Rashiduddin, our author’s contemporary. (See Elliot, I. p. 72.)

NOTE 2.—“Big as elephants” is only a façon de parler, but Marsden quotes modern exaggerations as to the height of the Arna or wild buffalo, more specific and extravagant. The unimpeachable authority of Mr. Hodgson tells us that the Arna in the Nepal Tarai sometimes does reach a height of 6 ft. 6 in. at the shoulder, with a length of 10 ft. 6 in. (excluding tail), and horns of 6 ft. 6 in. (J. A. S. B., XVI. 710.) Marco, however, seems to be speaking of domestic cattle. Some of the breeds of Upper India are very tall and noble animals, far surpassing in height any European oxen known to me; but in modern times these are rarely seen in Bengal, where the cattle are poor and stunted. The Aín Akbari, however, speaks of Sharífábád in Bengal, which appears to have corresponded to modern Bardwán, as producing very beautiful white oxen, of great size, and capable of carrying a load of 15 mans, which at Prinsep’s estimate of Akbar’s man would be about 600 lbs.

LVI. DISCOURSES OF THE PROVINCE OF CAUGIGU

Caugigu is a province towards the east, which has a king.{1} The people are Idolaters, and have a language of their own. They have made their submission to the Great Kaan, and send him tribute every year. And let me tell you their king is so given to luxury that he hath at the least 300 wives; for whenever he hears of any beautiful woman in the land, he takes and marries her.

They find in this country a good deal of gold, and they also have great abundance of spices. But they are such a long way from the sea that the products are of little value, and thus their price is low. They have elephants in great numbers, and other cattle of sundry kinds, and plenty of game. They live on flesh and milk and rice, and have wine made of rice and good spices. The whole of the people, or nearly so, have their skin marked with the needle in patterns representing lions, dragons, birds, and what not, done in such a way that it can never be obliterated. This work they cause to be wrought over face and neck and chest, arms and hands, and belly, and, in short, the whole body; and they look on it as a token of elegance, so that those who have the largest amount of this embroidery are regarded with the greatest admiration.

NOTE 1.—No province mentioned by Marco has given rise to wider and wilder conjectures than this, Cangigu as it has been generally printed.

M. Pauthier, who sees in it Laos, or rather one of the states of Laos called in the Chinese histories Papesifu, seems to have formed the most probable opinion hitherto propounded by any editor of Polo. I have no doubt that Laos or some part of that region is meant to be described, and that Pauthier is right regarding the general direction of the course here taken as being through the regions east of Burma, in a north-easterly direction up into Kwei-chau. But we shall be able to review the geography of this tract better, as a whole, at a point more advanced. I shall then speak of the name CAUGIGU, and why I prefer this reading of it.

I do not believe, for reasons which will also appear further on, that Polo is now following a route which he had traced in person, unless it be in the latter part of it.

M. Pauthier, from certain indications in a Chinese work, fixes on Chiangmai or Kiang-mai, the Zimmé of the Burmese (in about latitude 18° 48′ and long. 99° 30′) as the capital of the Papesifu and of the Caugigu of our text. It can scarcely however be the latter, unless we throw over entirely all the intervals stated in Polo’s itinerary; and M. Garnier informs me that he has evidence that the capital of the Papesifu at this time was Muang-Yong, a little to the south-east of Kiang-Tung, where he has seen its ruins.[1] That the people called by the Chinese Papesifu were of the great race of Laotians, Sháns, or Thai, is very certain, from the vocabulary of their language published by Klaproth.

Pauthier’s Chinese authority gives a puerile interpretation of Papesifu as signifying “the kingdom of the 800 wives,” and says it was called so because the Prince maintained that establishment. This may be an indication that there were popular stories about the numerous wives of the King of Laos, such as Polo had heard; but the interpretation is doubtless rubbish, like most of the so-called etymologies of proper names applied by the Chinese to foreign regions. At best these seem to be merely a kind of Memoria Technica, and often probably bear no more relation to the name in its real meaning than Swift’s All-eggs-under-the-grate bears to Alexander Magnus. How such “etymologies” arise is obvious from the nature of the Chinese system of writing. If we also had to express proper names by combining monosyllabic words already existing in English, we should in fact be obliged to write the name of the Macedonian hero much as Swift travestied it. As an example we may give the Chinese name of Java, Kwawa, which signifies “gourd-sound,” and was given to that Island, we are told, because the voice of its inhabitants is very like that of a dry gourd rolled upon the ground! It is usually stated that Tungking was called Kiao-chi, meaning “crossed-toes,” because the people often exhibit that malformation (which is a fact), but we may be certain that the syllables were originally a phonetic representation of an indigenous name which has no such meaning. As another example, less ridiculous but not more true, Chin-tan, representing the Indian name of China, Chínasthána, is explained to mean “Eastern-Dawn” (Aurore Orientale). (Amyot, XIV. 101; Klapr. Mém. III. 268.)

The states of Laos are shut out from the sea in the manner indicated; they abound in domestic elephants to an extraordinary extent; and the people do tattoo themselves in various degrees, most of all (as M. Garnier tells me) about Kiang Hung. The style of tattooing which the text describes is quite that of the Burmese, in speaking of whom Polo has omitted to mention the custom: “Every male Burman is tattooed in his boyhood from the middle to his knees; in fact he has a pair of breeches tattooed on him. The pattern is a fanciful medley of animals and arabesques, but it is scarcely distinguishable, save as a general tint, except on a fair skin.” (Mission to Ava, 151.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Indeed documents in Klaproth’s Asia Polyglotta show that the Papé state was also called Muang-Yong (pp. 364–365). I observe that the river running to the east of Pu-eul and Ssemao (Puer and Esmok) is called Papien-Kiang, the name of which is perhaps a memorial of the Papé.

[The old Laocian kingdom of Xieng-maï [Kiang-mai], called Muong-Yong by the Pa-y, was inhabited by the Pa-pe Si-fu or Bát-bá T’úc-phu; the inhabitants called themselves Thaï-niai or great Thaï. (Devéria, Frontière, p. 100.) Ch. ix. of the Chinese work Sze-i-kwan-kao is devoted to Xieng-maï (Pa-pe), which includes the subdivisions of Laos, Xieng Hung [Kiang Hung] and Muong-Ken. (Devéria, Mél. de Harlez, p. 97.)—H. C.]

LVII. CONCERNING THE PROVINCE OF ANIN

Anin is a Province towards the east, the people of which are subject to the Great Kaan, and are Idolaters. They live by cattle and tillage, and have a peculiar language. The women wear on the legs and arms bracelets of gold and silver of great value, and the men wear such as are even yet more costly. They have plenty of horses which they sell in great numbers to the Indians, making a great profit thereby. And they have also vast herds of buffaloes and oxen, having excellent pastures for these. They have likewise all the necessaries of life in abundance.{1}

Now you must know that between Anin and Caugigu, which we have left behind us, there is a distance of [25] days’ journey;{2} and from Caugigu to Bangala, the third province in our rear, is 30 days’ journey. We shall now leave Anin and proceed to another province which is some 8 days’ journey further, always going eastward.

NOTE 1.—Ramusio, the printed text of the Soc. de Géographie, and most editions have Amu; Pauthier reads Aniu, and considers the name to represent Tungking or Annam, called also Nan-yué. The latter word he supposes to be converted into Anyuë, Aniu. And accordingly he carries the traveller to the capital of Tungking.

Leaving the name for the present, according to the scheme of the route as I shall try to explain it below, I should seek for Amu or Aniu or Anin in the extreme south-east of Yun-nan. A part of this region was for the first time traversed by the officers of the French expedition up the Mekong, who in 1867 visited Sheu-ping, Lin-ngan and the upper valley of the River of Tungking on their way to Yun-nan-fu. To my question whether the description in the text, of Aniu or Anin and its fine pastures, applied to the tract just indicated, Lieut. Garnier replied on the whole favourably (see further on), proceeding: “The population about Sheu-ping is excessively mixt. On market days at that town one sees a gathering of wild people in great number and variety, and whose costumes are highly picturesque, as well as often very rich. There are the Pa-is, who are also found again higher up, the Ho-nhi, the Khato, the Lopé, the Shentseu. These tribes appear to be allied in part to the Laotians, in part to the Kakhyens.... The wilder races about Sheuping are remarkably handsome, and you see there types of women exhibiting an extraordinary regularity of feature, and at the same time a complexion surprisingly white. The Chinese look quite an inferior race beside them.... I may add that all these tribes, especially the Ho-nhi and the Pa-ï, wear large amounts of silver ornament; great collars of silver round the neck, as well as on the legs and arms.”

Though the whiteness of the people of Anin is not noticed by Polo, the distinctive manner in which he speaks in the next chapter of the dark complexion of the tribes described therein seems to indicate the probable omission of the opposite trait here.

The prominent position assigned in M. Garnier’s remarks to a race called Ho-nhi first suggested to me that the reading of the text might be ANIN instead of Aniu. And as a matter of fact this seems to my eyes to be clearly the reading of the Paris Livre des Merveilles (Pauthier’s MS. B), while the Paris No. 5631 (Pauthier’s A) has Auin, and what may be either Aniu or Anin. Anyn is also found in the Latin Brandenburg MS. of Pipino’s version collated by Andrew Müller, to which, however, we cannot ascribe much weight. But the two words are so nearly identical in mediæval writing, and so little likely to be discriminated by scribes who had nothing to guide their discrimination, that one need not hesitate to adopt that which is supported by argument. In reference to the suggested identity of Anin and Ho-nhi, M. Garnier writes again: “All that Polo has said regarding the country of Aniu, though not containing anything very characteristic, may apply perfectly to the different indigenous tribes, at present subject to the Chinese, which are dispersed over the country from Talan to Sheuping and Lin-ngan. These tribes bearing the names (given above) relate that they in other days formed an independent state, to which they give the name of Muang Shung. Where this Muang was situated there is no knowing. These tribes have langage par euls, as Marco Polo says, and silver ornaments are worn by them to this day in extraordinary profusion; more, however, by the women than the men. They have plenty of horses, buffaloes and oxen, and of sheep as well. It was the first locality in which the latter were seen. The plateau of Lin-ngan affords pasture-grounds which are exceptionally good for that part of the world.

“Beyond Lin-ngan we find the Ho-nhi, properly so called, no longer. But ought one to lay much stress on mere names which have undergone so many changes, and of which so many have been borne in succession by all those places and peoples?... I will content myself with reminding you that the town of Homi-cheu near Lin-ngan in the days of the Yuen bore the name of Ngo-ning.”

Notwithstanding M. Garnier’s caution, I am strongly inclined to believe that ANIN represents either HO-NHI or NGO-NING, if indeed these names be not identical. For on reference to Biot I see that the first syllable of the modern name of the town which M. Garnier writes HO_mí_, is expressed by the same character as the first syllable of NGO_ning_.

[The Wo-nhi are also called Ngo-ni, Kan-ni, Ho-ni, Lou-mi, No-pi, Ko-ni and Wa-heh; they descend from the southern barbarians called Ho-nhi. At the time of the kingdom of Nan-Chao, the Ho-nhi, called In-yuen, tribes were a dependence of the Kiang (Xieng) of Wei-yuen (Prefecture of P’u-erh). They are now to be found in the Yunnanese prefectures of Lin-ngan, King-tung, Chen-yuen, Yuen-kiang and Yun-nan. (See Devéria, p. 135.)—H. C.]

We give one of M. Garnier’s woodcuts representing some of the races in this vicinity. Their dress, as he notices, has, in some cases, a curious resemblance to costumes of Switzerland, or of Brittany, popular at fancy balls.[1] Coloured figures of some of these races will be found in the Atlas to Garnier’s work; see especially Plate 35.

NOTE 2.—All the French MSS. and other texts except Ramusio’s read 15. We adopt Ramusio’s reading, 25, for reasons which will appear below.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] There is a little uncertainty in the adjustment of names and figures of some of these tribes, between the illustrations and the incidental notices in Lieutenant Garnier’s work. But all the figures in the present cut certainly belong to the tract to which we point as Anin; and the two middle figures answer best to what is said of the Ho-nhi.

LVIII. CONCERNING THE PROVINCE OF COLOMAN

Coloman is a province towards the east, the people of which are Idolaters and have a peculiar language, and are subject to the Great Kaan. They are a [tall and] very handsome people, though in complexion brown rather than white, and are good soldiers.{1} They have a good many towns, and a vast number of villages, among great mountains, and in strong positions.{2}

When any of them die, the bodies are burnt, and then they take the bones and put them in little chests. These are carried high up the mountains, and placed in great caverns, where they are hung up in such wise that neither man nor beast can come at them.

A good deal of gold is found in the country, and for petty traffic they use porcelain shells such as I have told you of before. All these provinces that I have been speaking of, to wit Bangala and Caugigu and Anin, employ for currency porcelain shells and gold. There are merchants in this country who are very rich and dispose of large quantities of goods. The people live on flesh and rice and milk, and brew their wine from rice and excellent spices.

NOTE 1.—The only MSS. that afford the reading Coloman or Choloman instead of Toloman or Tholoman, are the Bern MS., which has Coloman in the initial word of the chapter, Paris MS. 5649 (Pauthier’s C) which has Coloman in the Table of Chapters, but not in the text, the Bodleian, and the Brandenburg MS. quoted in the last note. These variations in themselves have little weight. But the confusion between c and t in mediæval MSS., when dealing with strange names, is so constant that I have ventured to make the correction, in strong conviction that it is the right reading. M. Pauthier indeed, after speaking of tribes called Lo on the south-west of China, adds, “on les nommait To-lo-man (‘les nombreux Barbares Lo’).” Were this latter statement founded on actual evidence we might retain that form which is the usual reading. But I apprehend from the manner in which M. Pauthier produces it, without corroborative quotation, that he is rather hazarding a conjecture than speaking with authority. Be that as it may, it is impossible that Polo’s Toloman or Coloman should have been in the south of Kwangsi, where Pauthier locates it.

On the other hand, we find tribes of both Kolo and Kihlau Barbarians (i.e. Mán, whence KOLO-MÁN or Kihlau-mán) very numerous on the frontier of Kweichau. (See Bridgman’s transl. of Tract on Meautsze, pp. 265, 269, 270, 272, 273, 274, 275, 278, 279, 280.) Among these the Kolo, described as No. 38 in that Tract, appear to me from various particulars to be the most probable representatives of the Coloman of Polo, notwithstanding the sentence with which the description opens: “Kolo originally called Luluh; the modern designation Kolo is incorrect.”[1] They are at present found in the prefecture of Tating (one of the departments of Kweichau towards the Yun-nan side). “They are tall, of a dark complexion, with sunken eyes, aquiline nose, wear long whiskers, and have the beard shaved off above the mouth. They pay great deference to demons, and on that account are sometimes called ‘Dragons of Lo.’... At the present time these Kolo are divided into 48 clans, the elders of which are called Chieftains (lit. ‘Head-and-Eyes’) and are of nine grades.... The men bind their hair into a tuft with blue cloth and make it fast on the forehead like a horn. Their upper dresses are short, with large sleeves, and their lower garments are fine blue. When one of the chieftains dies, all that were under him are assembled together clad in armour and on horseback. Having dressed his corpse in silk and woollen robes, they burn it in the open country; then, invoking the departed spirit, they inter the ashes. Their attachment to him as their sole master is such that nothing can drive or tempt them from their allegiance. Their large bows, long spears, and sharp swords, are strong and well-wrought. They train excellent horses, love archery and hunting; and so expert are they in tactics that their soldiers rank as the best among all the uncivilized tribes. There is this proverb: ‘The Lo Dragons of Shwui-si rap the head and strike the tail,’ which is intended to indicate their celerity in defence.” (Bridgman, pp. 272–273.)

The character Lo, here applied in the Chinese Tract to these people, is the same as that in the name of the Kwangsi Lo of M. Pauthier.

I append a cut (opposite page) from the drawing representing these Kolo-man in the original work from which Bridgman translated, and which is in the possession of Dr. Lockhart.

[I believe we must read To-lo-man. Man, barbarian, T’u-lao or Shan-tzŭ (mountaineers) who live in the Yunnanese prefectures of Lin-ngan, Cheng-kiang, etc. T’u-la-Man or T’u-la barbarians of the Mongol Annals. (Yuen-shi lei-pien, quoted by Devéria, p. 115.)—H. C.]

NOTE 2.—Magaillans, speaking of the semi-independent tribes of Kwei-chau and Kwang-si, says: “Their towns are usually so girt by high mountains and scarped rocks that it seems as if nature had taken a pleasure in fortifying them” (p. 43). (See cut at p. 131.)

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] On the other hand, M. Garnier writes: “I do not know any name at all like Kolo, except Lolo, the generic name given by the Chinese to the wild tribes of Yun-nan.” Does not this look as if Kolo were really the old name, Luluh or Lolo the later?

LIX. CONCERNING THE PROVINCE OF CUIJU

Cuiju is a province towards the East.{1} After leaving Coloman you travel along a river for 12 days, meeting with a good number of towns and villages, but nothing worthy of particular mention. After you have travelled those twelve days along the river you come to a great and noble city which is called FUNGUL.

The people are Idolaters and subject to the Great Kaan, and live by trade and handicrafts. You must know they manufacture stuffs of the bark of certain trees which form very fine summer clothing.{2} They are good soldiers, and have paper-money. For you must understand that henceforward we are in the countries where the Great Kaan’s paper-money is current.

The country swarms with lions to that degree that no man can venture to sleep outside his house at night.{3} Moreover, when you travel on that river, and come to a halt at night, unless you keep a good way from the bank the lions will spring on the boat and snatch one of the crew and make off with him and devour him. And but for a certain help that the inhabitants enjoy, no one could venture to travel in that province, because of the multitude of those lions, and because of their strength and ferocity.

But you see they have in this province a large breed of dogs, so fierce and bold that two of them together will attack a lion.{4} So every man who goes a journey takes with him a couple of those dogs, and when a lion appears they have at him with the greatest boldness, and the lion turns on them, but can’t touch them for they are very deft at eschewing his blows. So they follow him, perpetually giving tongue, and watching their chance to give him a bite in the rump or in the thigh, or wherever they may. The lion makes no reprisal except now and then to turn fiercely on them, and then indeed were he to catch the dogs it would be all over with them, but they take good care that he shall not. So, to escape the dogs’ din, the lion makes off, and gets into the wood, where mayhap he stands at bay against a tree to have his rear protected from their annoyance. And when the travellers see the lion in this plight they take to their bows, for they are capital archers, and shoot their arrows at him till he falls dead. And ’tis thus that travellers in those parts do deliver themselves from those lions.

They have a good deal of silk and other products which are carried up and down, by the river of which we spoke, into various quarters.{5}

You travel along the river for twelve days more, finding a good many towns all along, and the people always Idolaters, and subject to the Great Kaan, with paper-money current, and living by trade and handicrafts. There are also plenty of fighting men. And after travelling those twelve days you arrive at the city of Sindafu of which we spoke in this book some time ago.{6}

From Sindafu you set out again and travel some 70 days through the provinces and cities and towns which we have already visited, and all which have been already particularly spoken of in our Book. At the end of those 70 days you come to Juju where we were before.{7}

From Juju you set out again and travel four days towards the south, finding many towns and villages. The people are great traders and craftsmen, are all Idolaters, and use the paper-money of the Great Kaan their Sovereign. At the end of those four days you come to the city of Cacanfu belonging to the province of Cathay, and of it I shall now speak.

NOTE 1.—In spite of difficulties which beset the subject (see Note 6 below) the view of Pauthier, suggested doubtingly by Marsden, that the Cuiju of the text is KWEI-CHAU, seems the most probable one. As the latter observes, the reappearance of paper money shows that we have got back into a province of China Proper. Such, Yun-nan, recently conquered from a Shan prince, could not be considered. But, according to the best view we can form, the traveller could only have passed through the extreme west of the province of Kwei-chau.

The name of Fungul, if that be a true reading, is suggestive of Phungan, which under the Mongols was the head of a district called PHUNGAN-LU. It was founded by that dynasty, and was regarded as an important position for the command of the three provinces Kwei-chau, Kwang-si, and Yun-nan. (Biot, p. 168; Martini, p. 137.) But we shall explain presently the serious difficulties that beset the interpretation of the itinerary as it stands.

NOTE 2.—Several Chinese plants afford a fibre from the bark, and some of these are manufactured into what we call grass-cloths. The light smooth textures so called are termed by the Chinese Hiapu or “summer cloths.” Kwei-chau produces such. But perhaps that specially intended is a species of hemp (Urtica Nivea?) of which M. Perny of the R. C. Missions says, in his notes on Kwei-chau: “It affords a texture which may be compared to batiste. This has the notable property of keeping so cool that many people cannot wear it even in the hot weather. Generally it is used only for summer clothing.” (Dict. des Tissus, VII. 404; Chin. Repos. XVIII. 217 and 529; Ann. de la Prop. de la Foi, XXXI. 137.)

NOTE 3.—Tigers of course are meant. (See supra, vol. i. p. 399.) M. Perny speaks of tigers in the mountainous parts of Kwei-chau. (Op. cit. 139.)

NOTE 4.—These great dogs were noticed by Lieutenant (now General) Macleod, in his journey to Kiang Hung on the great River Mekong, as accompanying the caravans of Chinese traders on their way to the Siamese territory. (See Macleod’s Journal, p. 66.)

NOTE 5.—The trade in wild silk (i.e. from the oak-leaf silkworm) is in truth an important branch of commerce in Kwei-chau. But the chief seat of this is at Tsuni-fu, and I do not think that Polo’s route can be sought so far to the eastward. (Ann. de la Prop. XXXI. 136; Richthofen, Letter VII. 81.)

NOTE 6.—We have now got back to Sindafu, i.e. Ch’êng-tu fu in Sze-ch’wan, and are better able to review the geography of the track we have been following. I do not find it possible to solve all its difficulties.

The different provinces treated of in the chapters from lv. to lix. are strung by Marco upon an easterly, or, as we must interpret, north-easterly line of travel, real or hypothetical. Their names and intervals are as follows: (1) Bangala; whence 30 marches to (2) Caugigu; 25 marches to (3) Anin; 8 marches to (4) Toloman or Coloman; 12 days in Cuiju along a river to the city of (5) Fungul, Sinugul (or what not); 12 days further, on or along the same river, to (6) Ch’êng-tu fu. Total from Bangala to Ch’êng-tu fu 87 days.

I have said that the line of travel is real or hypothetical, for no doubt a large part of it was only founded on hearsay. We last left our traveller at Mien, or on the frontier of Yun-nan and Mien. Bangala is reached per saltum with no indication of interval, and its position is entirely misapprehended. Marco conceives of it, not as in India, but as being, like Mien, a province on the confines of India, as being under the same king as Mien, as lying to the south of that kingdom, and as being at the (south) western extremity of a great traverse line which runs (north) east into Kwei-chau and Sze-ch’wan. All these conditions point consistently to one locality; that, however, is not Bengal but Pegu. On the other hand, the circumstances of manners and products, so far as they go, do belong to Bengal. I conceive that Polo’s information regarding these was derived from persons who had really visited Bengal by sea, but that he had confounded what he so heard of the Delta of the Ganges with what he heard on the Yun-nan frontier of the Delta of the Irawadi. It is just the same kind of error that is made about those great Eastern Rivers by Fra Mauro in his Map. And possibly the name of Pegu (in Burmese Bagóh) may have contributed to his error, as well as the probable fact that the Kings of Burma did at this time claim to be Kings of Bengal, whilst they actually were Kings of Pegu.

Caugigu.—We have seen reason to agree with M. Pauthier that the description of this region points to Laos, though we cannot with him assign it to Kiang-mai. Even if it be identical with the Papesifu of the Chinese, we have seen that the centre of that state may be placed at Muang Yong not far from the Mekong; whilst I believe that the limits of Caugigu must be drawn much nearer the Chinese and Tungking territory, so as to embrace Kiang Hung, and probably the Papien River. (See note at p. 117.)

As regards the name, it is possible that it may represent some specific name of the Upper Laos territory. But I am inclined to believe that we are dealing with a case of erroneous geographical perspective like that of Bangala; and that whilst the circumstances belong to Upper Laos, the name, read as I read it, Caugigu (or Cavgigu), is no other than the Ḳafchikúe of Rashiduddin, the name applied by him to Tungking, and representing the KIAOCHI-KWÊ of the Chinese. D’Anville’s Atlas brings Kiaochi up to the Mekong in immediate contact with Che-li or Kiang Hung. I had come to the conclusion that Caugigu was probably the correct reading before I was aware that it is an actual reading of the Geog. Text more than once, of Pauthier’s A more than once, of Pauthier’s C at least once and possibly twice, and of the Bern MS.; all which I have ascertained from personal examination of those manuscripts.[1]

Anin or Aniu.—I have already pointed out that I seek this in the territory about Lin-ngan and Homi. In relation to this M. Garnier writes: “In starting from Muang Yong, or even if you prefer it, from Xieng Hung (Kiang Hung of our maps), ... it would be physically impossible in 25 days to get beyond the arc which I have laid down on your map (viz. extending a few miles north-east of Homi). There are scarcely any roads in those mountains, and easy lines of communication begin only after you have got to the Lin-ngan territory. In Marco Polo’s days things were certainly not better, but the reverse. All that has been done of consequence in the way of roads, posts, and organisation in the part of Yun-nan between Lin-ngan and Xieng Hung, dates in some degree from the Yuen, but in a far greater degree from K’ang-hi.” Hence, even with the Ramusian reading of the itinerary, we cannot place Anin much beyond the position indicated already.

Koloman.—We have seen that the position of this region is probably near the western frontier of Kwei-chau. Adhering to Homi as the representative of Anin, and to the 8 days’ journey of the text, the most probable position of Koloman would be about Lo-ping, which lies about 100 English miles in a straight line north-east from Homi. The first character of the name here is again the same as the Lo of the Kolo tribes.

Beyond this point the difficulties of devising an interpretation, consistent at once with facts and with the text as it stands, become insuperable.

The narrative demands that from Koloman we should reach Fungul, a great and noble city, by travelling 12 days along a river, and that Fungul should be within twelve days’ journey of Ch’êng-tu fu, along the same river, or at least along rivers connected with it.

In advancing from the south-west guided by the data afforded by the texts, we have not been able to carry the position of Fungul (Sinugul, or what not of G. T. and other MSS.) further north than Phungan. But it is impossible that Ch’êng-tu fu should have been reached in 12 days from this point. Nor is it possible that a new post in a secluded position, like Phungan, could have merited to be described as “a great and noble city.”

Baron v. Richthofen has favoured me with a note in which he shows that in reality the only place answering the more essential conditions of Fungul is Siu-chau fu at the union of the two great branches of the Yang-tzŭ, viz. the Kin-sha Kiang, and the Min-Kiang from Ch’êng-tu fu. (1) The distance from Siu-chau to Ch’êng-tu by land travelling is just about 12 days, and the road is along a river. (2) In approaching “Fungul” from the south Polo met with a good many towns and villages. This would be the case along either of the navigable rivers that join the Yang-tzŭ below Siu-chau (or along that which joins above Siu-chau, mentioned further on). (3) The large trade in silk up and down the river is a characteristic that could only apply to the Yang-tzŭ.

These reasons are very strong, though some little doubt must subsist until we can explain the name (Fungul, or Sinugul) as applicable to Siu-chau.[2] And assuming Siu-chau to be the city we must needs carry the position of Coloman considerably further north than Lo-ping, and must presume the interval between Anin and Coloman to be greatly understated, through clerical or other error. With these assumptions we should place Polo’s Coloman in the vicinity of Wei-ning, one of the localities of Kolo tribes.

From a position near Wei-ning it would be quite possible to reach Siu-chau in 12 days, making use of the facilities afforded by one or other of the partially navigable rivers to which allusion has just been made.

“That one,” says M. Garnier in a letter, “which enters the Kiang a little above Siu-chau fu, the River of Lowa-tong, which was descended by our party, has a branch to the eastward which is navigable up to about the latitude of Chao-tong. Is not this probably Marco Polo’s route? It is to this day a line much frequented, and one on which great works have been executed; among others two iron suspension bridges, works truly gigantic for the country in which we find them.”

An extract from a Chinese Itinerary of this route, which M. Garnier has since communicated to me, shows that at a point 4 days from Wei-ning the traveller may embark and continue his voyage to any point on the great Kiang.

We are obliged, indeed, to give up the attempt to keep to a line of communicating rivers throughout the whole 24 days. Nor do I see how it is possible to adhere to that condition literally without taking more material liberties with the text.

Book II

My theory of Polo’s actual journey would be that he returned from Yun-nan fu to Ch’êng-tu fu through some part of the province of Kwei-chau, perhaps only its western extremity, but that he spoke of Caugigu, and probably of Anin, as he did of Bangala, from report only. And, in recapitulation, I would identify provisionally the localities spoken of in this difficult itinerary as follows: Caugigu with Kiang Hung; Anin with Homi; Coloman with the country about Wei-ning in Western Kwei-chau; Fungul or Sinugul with Siu-chau.

[This itinerary is difficult, as Sir Henry Yule says. It takes Marco Polo 24 days to go from Coloman or Toloman to Ch’êng-tu. The land route is 22 days from Yun-nan fu to Swi-fu, viâ Tung-ch’wan and Chao-t’ung. (J. China B. R. A. S. XXVIII. 74–75.) From the Toloman province, which I place about Lin-ngan and Cheng-kiang, south of Yun-nan fu, Polo must have passed a second time through this city, which is indeed at the end of all the routes of this part of South-Western China. He might go back to Sze-ch’wan by the western route, viâ Tung-ch’wan and Chao-t’ung to Swi-fu, or, by the eastern, easier and shorter route by Siuen-wei chau, crossing a corner of the Kwei-chau province (Wei-ning), and passing by Yun-ning hien to the Kiang; this is the route followed by Mr. A. Hosie in 1883 and by Mr. F. S. A. Bourne in 1885, and with great likelihood by Marco Polo; he may have taken the Yun-ning River to the district city of Na-ch’i hien, which lies on the right bank both of this river and of the Kiang; the Kiang up to Swi-fu and thence to Ch’êng-tu. I do not attempt to explain the difficulty about Fungul.

I fully agree with Sir H. Yule when he says that Polo spoke of Caugigu and of Bangala, probably of Anin, from report only. However, I believe that Caugigu is the Kiao-Chi kwé of the Chinese, that Ani_n_ must be read Ani_u_, that Aniu is but a transcription of Nan-yué, that both Nan-yué and Kiao-Chi represent Northern Annam, i.e. the portion of Annam which we call Tung-king. Regarding the tattooed inhabitants of Caugigu, let it be remembered that tattooing existed in Annam till it was prohibited by the Chinese during the occupation of Tung-king at the beginning of the 15th century.—H. C.]

NOTE 7.—Here the traveller gets back to the road-bifurcation near Juju, i.e. Chochau (ante p. 11), and thence commences to travel southward.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] A passing suggestion of the identity of Kafchi Kué and Caugigu is made by D’Ohsson, and I formerly objected. (See Cathay, p. 272.)

[2] Cuiju might be read Ciuju—representing Siuchau, but the difficulty about Fungul would remain.

LX. CONCERNING THE CITIES OF CACANFU AND OF CHANGLU

Cacanfu is a noble city. The people are Idolaters and burn their dead; they have paper-money, and live by trade and handicrafts. For they have plenty of silk from which they weave stuffs of silk and gold, and sendals in large quantities. [There are also certain Christians at this place, who have a church.] And the city is at the head of an important territory containing numerous towns and villages. [A great river passes through it, on which much merchandise is carried to the city of Cambaluc, for by many channels and canals it is connected therewith.{1}]

We will now set forth again, and travel three days towards the south, and then we come to a town called CHANGLU. This is another great city belonging to the Great Kaan, and to the province of Cathay. The people have paper-money, and are Idolaters and burn their dead. And you must know they make salt in great quantities at this place; I will tell you how ’tis done.{2}

A kind of earth is found there which is exceedingly salt. This they dig up and pile in great heaps. Upon these heaps they pour water in quantities till it runs out at the bottom; and then they take up this water and boil it well in great iron cauldrons, and as it cools it deposits a fine white salt in very small grains. This salt they then carry about for sale to many neighbouring districts, and get great profit thereby.

There is nothing else worth mentioning, so let us go forward five days’ journey, and we shall come to a city called Chinangli.

NOTE 1.—In the greater part of the journey which occupies the remainder of Book II., Pauthier is a chief authority, owing to his industrious Chinese reading and citation. Most of his identifications seem well founded, though sometimes we shall be constrained to dissent from them widely. A considerable number have been anticipated by former editors, but even in such cases he is often able to bring forward new grounds.

CACANFU is HO-KIEN FU in Pe Chih-li, 52 miles in a direct line south by east of Chochau. It was the head of one of the Lu or circuits into which the Mongols divided China. (Pauthier.)

NOTE 2.—Marsden and Murray have identified Changlu with T’SANG-CHAU in Pe Chih-li, about 30 miles east by south of Ho-kien fu. This seems substantially right, but Pauthier shows that there was an old town actually called CH’ANGLU, separated from T’sang-chau only by the great canal. [Ch’ang-lu was the name of T’sang-chau under the T’ang and the Kin. (See Playfair, Dict., p. 34.)—H. C.]

The manner of obtaining salt, described in the text, is substantially the same as one described by Duhalde, and by one of the missionaries, as being employed near the mouth of the Yang-tzŭ kiang. There is a town of the third order some miles south-east of T’sang-chau, called Yen-shan or “salt-hill,” and, according to Pauthier, T’sang-chau is the mart for salt produced there. (Duhalde in Astley, IV. 310; Lettres Edif. XI. 267 seqq.; Biot. p. 283.)

Polo here introduces a remark about the practice of burning the dead, which, with the notice of the idolatry of the people, and their use of paper-money, constitutes a formula which he repeats all through the Chinese provinces with wearisome iteration. It is, in fact, his definition of the Chinese people, for whom he seems to lack a comprehensive name.

A great change seems to have come over Chinese custom, since the Middle Ages, in regard to the disposal of the dead. Cremation is now entirely disused, except in two cases; one, that of the obsequies of a Buddhist priest, and the other that in which the coffin instead of being buried has been exposed in the fields, and in the lapse of time has become decayed. But it is impossible to reject the evidence that it was a common practice in Polo’s age. He repeats the assertion that it was the custom at every stage of his journey through Eastern China; though perhaps his taking absolutely no notice of the practice of burial is an instance of that imperfect knowledge of strictly Chinese peculiarities which has been elsewhere ascribed to him. It is the case, however, that the author of the Book of the Estate of the Great Kaan (circa 1330) also speaks of cremation as the usual Chinese practice, and that Ibn Batuta says positively: “The Chinese are infidels and idolaters, and they burn their dead after the manner of the Hindus.” This is all the more curious, because the Arab Relations of the 9th century say distinctly that the Chinese bury their dead, though they often kept the body long (as they do still) before burial; and there is no mistaking the description which Conti (15th century) gives of the Chinese mode of sepulture. Mendoza, in the 16th century, alludes to no disposal of the dead except by burial, but Semedo in the early part of the 17th says that bodies were occasionally burnt, especially in Sze-ch’wan.

I am greatly indebted to the kindness of an eminent Chinese scholar, Mr. W. F. Mayers, of Her Majesty’s Legation at Peking, who, in a letter, dated Peking, 18th September, 1874, sends me the following memorandum on the subject:—

“Colonel Yule’s Marco Polo, II. 97 [First Edition], Burning of the Dead.

“On this subject compare the article entitled Huo Tsang, or ‘Cremation Burials,’ in Bk. XV of the Jih Che Luh, or ‘Daily Jottings,’ a great collection of miscellaneous notes on classical, historical, and antiquarian subjects, by Ku Yen-wu, a celebrated author of the 17th century. The article is as follows:—

“‘The practice of burning the dead flourished (or flourishes) most extensively in Kiang-nan, and was in vogue already in the period of the Sung Dynasty. According to the history of the Sung Dynasty, in the 27th year of the reign Shao-hing (A.D. 1157), the practice was animadverted upon by a public official.’ Here follows a long extract, in which the burning of the dead is reprehended, and it is stated that cemeteries were set apart by Government on behalf of the poorer classes.

“In A.D. 1261, Hwang Chên, governor of the district of Wu, in a memorial praying that the erection of cremation furnaces might thenceforth be prohibited, dwelt upon the impropriety of burning the remains of the deceased, for whose obsequies a multitude of observances were prescribed by the religious rites. He further exposed the fallacy of the excuse alleged for the practice, to wit, that burning the dead was a fulfilment of the precepts of Buddha, and accused the priests of a certain monastery of converting into a source of illicit gain the practice of cremation.”

[As an illustration of the cremation of a Buddhist priest, I note the following passage from an article published in the North-China Herald, 20th May, 1887, p. 556, on Kwei Hua Ch’eng, Mongolia: “Several Lamas are on visiting terms with me and they are very friendly. There are seven large and eight small Lamaseries, in care of from ten to two hundred Lamas. The principal Lamas at death are cremated. A short time ago, a friendly Lama took me to see a cremation. The furnace was roughly made of mud bricks, with four fire-holes at the base, with an opening in which to place the body. The whole was about 6 feet high, and about 5 feet in circumference. Greased fuel was arranged within and covered with glazed foreign calico, on which were written some Tibetan characters. A tent was erected and mats arranged for the Lamas. About 11.30 A.M. a scarlet covered bier appeared in sight carried by thirty-two beggars. A box 2 feet square and 2½ feet high was taken out and placed near the furnace. The Lamas arrived and attired themselves in gorgeous robes and sat cross-legged. During the preparations to chant, some butter was being melted in a corner of the tent. A screen of calico was drawn round the furnace in which the cremator placed the body, and filled up the opening. Then a dozen Lamas began chanting the burial litany in Tibetan in deep bass voices. Then the head priest blessed the torches and when the fires were lit he blessed a fan to fan the flames, and lastly some melted butter, which was poured in at the top to make the whole blaze. This was frequently repeated. When fairly ablaze, a few pieces of Tibetan grass were thrown in at the top. After three days the whole cooled, and a priest with one gold and one silver chopstick collects the bones, which are placed in a bag for burial. If the bones are white it is a sign that his sin is purged, if black that perfection has not been attained.”—H. C.]

And it is very worthy of note that the Chinese envoy to Chinla (Kamboja) in 1295, an individual who may have personally known Marco Polo, in speaking of the custom prevalent there of exposing the dead, adds: “There are some, however, who burn their dead. These are all descendants of Chinese immigrants.”

[Professor J. J. M. de Groot remarks that “being of religious origin, cremation is mostly denoted in China by clerical terms, expressive of the metamorphosis the funeral pyre is intended to effect, viz. ‘transformation of man’; ‘transformation of the body’; ‘metamorphosis by fire.’ Without the clerical sphere it bears no such high-sounding names, being simply called ‘incineration of corpses.’ A term of illogical composition, and nevertheless very common in the books, is ‘fire burial.’” It appears that during the Sung Dynasty cremation was especially common in the provinces of Shan-si, Cheh-kiang, and Kiang-su. During the Mongol Dynasty, the instances of cremation which are mentioned in Chinese books are, relatively speaking, numerous. Professor de Groot says also that “there exists evidence that during the Mongol domination cremation also throve in Fuhkien.” (Religious System of China, vol. iii. pp. 1391, 1409, 1410.)—H. C.]

(Doolittle, 190; Deguignes, I. 69; Cathay, pp. 247, 479; Reinaud, I. 56; India in the XVth Century, p. 23; Semedo, p. 95; Rém. Mél. Asiat. I. 128.)

Chapter LXI

CONCERNING THE CITY OF CHINANGLI, AND THAT OF TADINFU, AND THE REBELLION OF LITAN.

Chinangli is a city of Cathay as you go south, and it belongs to the Great Kaan; the people are Idolaters, and have paper-money. There runs through the city a great and wide river, on which a large traffic in silk goods and spices and other costly merchandize passes up and down.

When you travel south from Chinangli for five days, you meet everywhere with fine towns and villages, the people of which are all Idolaters, and burn their dead, and are subject to the Great Kaan, and have paper-money, and live by trade and handicrafts, and have all the necessaries of life in great abundance. But there is nothing particular to mention on the way till you come, at the end of those five days, to TADINFU.{1}

This, you must know, is a very great city, and in old times was the seat of a great kingdom; but the Great Kaan conquered it by force of arms. Nevertheless it is still the noblest city in all those provinces. There are very great merchants here, who trade on a great scale, and the abundance of silk is something marvellous. They have, moreover, most charming gardens abounding with fruit of large size. The city of Tadinfu hath also under its rule eleven imperial cities of great importance, all of which enjoy a large and profitable trade, owing to that immense produce of silk.{2}

Now, you must know, that in the year of Christ, 1273, the Great Kaan had sent a certain Baron called LIYTAN SANGON,{3} with some 80,000 horse, to this province and city, to garrison them. And after the said captain had tarried there a while, he formed a disloyal and traitorous plot, and stirred up the great men of the province to rebel against the Great Kaan. And so they did; for they broke into revolt against their sovereign lord, and refused all obedience to him, and made this Liytan, whom their sovereign had sent thither for their protection, to be the chief of their revolt.

When the Great Kaan heard thereof he straightway despatched two of his Barons, one of whom was called AGUIL and the other MONGOTAY;{4} giving them 100,000 horse and a great force of infantry. But the affair was a serious one, for the Barons were met by the rebel Liytan with all those whom he had collected from the province, mustering more than 100,000 horse and a large force of foot. Nevertheless in the battle Liytan and his party were utterly routed, and the two Barons whom the Emperor had sent won the victory. When the news came to the Great Kaan he was right well pleased, and ordered that all the chiefs who had rebelled, or excited others to rebel, should be put to a cruel death, but that those of lower rank should receive a pardon. And so it was done. The two Barons had all the leaders of the enterprise put to a cruel death, and all those of lower rank were pardoned. And thenceforward they conducted themselves with loyalty towards their lord.{5}

Now having told you all about this affair, let us have done with it, and I will tell you of another place that you come to in going south, which is called SINJU-MATU.

NOTE 1.—There seems to be no solution to the difficulties attaching to the account of these two cities (Chinangli and Tadinfu) except that the two have been confounded, either by a lapse of memory on the traveller’s part or by a misunderstanding on that of Rusticiano.

The position and name of CHINANGLI point, as Pauthier has shown, to T’SI-NAN FU, the chief city of Shan-tung. The second city is called in the G. Text and Pauthier’s MSS. Candinfu, Condinfu, and Cundinfu, names which it has not been found possible to elucidate. But adopting the reading Tadinfu of some of the old printed editions (supported by the Tudinfu of Ramusio and the Tandifu of the Riccardian MS.), Pauthier shows that the city now called Yen-chau bore under the Kin the name of TAI-TING FU, which may fairly thus be recognised. [Under the Sung Dynasty Yen-chau was named T’ai-ning and Lung-k’ing. (Playfair’s Dict. p. 388.)—H. C.]

It was not, however, Yen-chau, but T’si-nan fu, which was “the noblest city in all those provinces,” and had been “in old times the seat of a kingdom,” as well as recently the scene of the episode of Litan’s rebellion. T’si-nan fu lies in a direct line 86 miles south of T’sang-chau (Changlu), near the banks of the Ta-t’sing ho, a large river which communicates with the great canal near T’si-ning chau, and which was, no doubt, of greater importance in Polo’s time than in the last six centuries. For up nearly to the origin of the Mongol power it appears to have been one of the main discharges of the Hwang-Ho. The recent changes in that river have again brought its main stream into the same channel, and the “New Yellow River” passes three or four miles to the north of the city. T’si-nan fu has frequently of late been visited by European travellers, who report it as still a place of importance, with much life and bustle, numerous book-shops, several fine temples, two mosques, and all the furniture of a provincial capital. It has also a Roman Catholic Cathedral of Gothic architecture. (Williamson, I. 102.)

[Tsi-nan “is a populous and rich city; and by means of the river (Ta Tsing ho, Great Clear River) carries on an extensive commerce. The soil is fertile, and produces grain and fruits in abundance. Silk of an excellent quality is manufactured, and commands a high price. The lakes and rivers are well stored with fish.” (_Chin. Rep._ XI. p. 562.)—H. C.]

NOTE 2.—The Chinese Annals, more than 2000 years B.C., speak of silk as an article of tribute from Shan-tung; and evidently it was one of the provinces most noted in the Middle Ages for that article. Compare the quotation in note on next chapter from Friar Odoric. Yet the older modern accounts speak only of the wild silk of Shan-tung. Mr. Williamson, however, points out that there is an extensive produce from the genuine mulberry silkworm, and anticipates a very important trade in Shan-tung silk. Silk fabrics are also largely produced, and some of extraordinary quality. (Williamson, I. 112, 131.)

The expressions of Padre Martini, in speaking of the wild silk of Shan-tung, strongly remind one of the talk of the ancients about the origin of silk, and suggest the possibility that this may not have been mere groundless fancy: “Non in globum aut ovum ductum, sed in longissimum filum paulatim ex ore emissum, albi coloris, quæ arbustis dumisque, adhærentia, atque a vento huc illucque agitata colliguntur,” etc. Compare this with Pliny’s “Seres lanitia silvarum nobiles, perfusam aqua depectentes frondium caniciem,” or Claudian’s “Stamine, quod molli tondent de stipite Seres, Frondea lanigeræ carpentes vellera silvæ; Et longum tenues tractus producit in aurum.”

NOTE 3.—The title Sangon is, as Pauthier points out, the Chinese Tsiang-kiun, a “general of division,” [or better “Military Governor”.—H. C.] John Bell calls an officer, bearing the same title, “Merin Sanguin.” I suspect T’siang-kiun is the Jang-Jang of Baber.

NOTE 4.—AGUL was the name of a distant cousin of Kúblái, who was the father of Nayan (supra, ch. ii. and Genealogy of the House of Chinghiz in Appendix A). MANGKUTAI, under Kúblái, held the command of the third Hazara (Thousand) of the right wing, in which he had succeeded his father Jedi Noyan. He was greatly distinguished in the invasion of South China under Bayan. (Erdmann’s Temudschin, pp. 220, 455; Gaubil, p. 160.)

NOTE 5.—LITAN, a Chinese of high military position and reputation under the Mongols, in the early part of Kúblái’s reign, commanded the troops in Shan-tung and the conquered parts of Kiang-nan. In the beginning of 1262 he carried out a design that he had entertained since Kúblái’s accession, declared for the Sung Emperor, to whom he gave up several important places, put detached Mongol garrisons to the sword, and fortified T’si-nan and T’sing-chau. Kúblái despatched Prince Apiché and the General Ssetienché against him. Litan, after some partial success, was beaten and driven into T’si-nan, which the Mongols immediately invested. After a blockade of four months, the garrison was reduced to extremities. Litan, in despair, put his women to death and threw himself into a lake adjoining the city; but he was taken out alive and executed. T’sing-chau then surrendered. (Gaubil, 139–140; De Mailla, IX. 298 seqq.; D’Ohsson, II. 381.)

Pauthier gives greater detail from the Chinese Annals, which confirm the amnesty granted to all but the chiefs of the rebellion.

The date in the text is wrong or corrupt, as is generally the case.

LXII. CONCERNING THE NOBLE CITY OF SINJUMATU

On leaving Tadinfu you travel three days towards the south, always finding numbers of noble and populous towns and villages flourishing with trade and manufactures. There is also abundance of game in the country, and everything in profusion.

When you have travelled those three days you come to the noble city of SINJUMATU, a rich and fine place, with great trade and manufactures. The people are Idolaters and subjects of the Great Kaan, and have paper-money, and they have a river which I can assure you brings them great gain, and I will tell you about it.

You see the river in question flows from the South to this city of Sinjumatu. And the people of the city have divided this larger river in two, making one half of it flow east and the other half flow west; that is to say, the one branch flows towards Manzi and the other towards Cathay. And it is a fact that the number of vessels at this city is what no one would believe without seeing them. The quantity of merchandize also which these vessels transport to Manzi and Cathay is something marvellous; and then they return loaded with other merchandize, so that the amount of goods borne to and fro on those two rivers is quite astonishing.{1}

NOTE 1.—Friar Odoric, proceeding by water northward to Cambaluc about 1324–1325, says: “As I travelled by that river towards the east, and passed many towns and cities, I came to a certain city which is called SUNZUMATU, which hath a greater plenty of silk than perhaps any place on earth, for when silk is at the dearest you can still have 40 lbs. for less than eight groats. There is in the place likewise great store of merchandise,” etc. When commenting on Odoric, I was inclined to identify this city with Lin-t’sing chau, but its position with respect to the two last cities in Polo’s itinerary renders this inadmissible; and Murray and Pauthier seem to be right in identifying it with T’SI-NING CHAU. The affix Matu (Ma-t’eu, a jetty, a place of river trade) might easily attach itself to the name of such a great depôt of commerce on the canal as Marco here describes, though no Chinese authority has been produced for its being so styled. The only objection to the identification with T’si-ning chau is the difficulty of making 3 days’ journey of the short distance between Yen-chau and that city.

Polo, according to the route supposed, comes first upon the artificial part of the Great Canal here. The rivers Wen and Sse (from near Yen-chau) flowing from the side of Shan-tung, and striking the canal line at right angles near T’si-ning chau, have been thence diverted north-west and south-east, so as to form the canal; the point of their original confluence at Nan-wang forming, apparently, the summit level of the canal. There is a little confusion in Polo’s account, owing to his describing the river as coming from the south, which, according to his orientation, would be the side towards Honan. In this respect his words would apply more accurately to the Wei River at Lin-t’sing (see Biot in J. As. sér. III. tom. xiv. 194, and J. N. C. B. R. A. S., 1866, p. 11; also the map with ch. lxiv.) [Father Gandar (Canal Impérial, p. 22, note) says that the remark of Marco Polo: “The river flows from the south to this city of Sinjumatu,” cannot be applied to the Wen-ho nor to the Sse-ho, which are rivers of little importance and running from the east, whilst the Wei-ho, coming from the south-east, waters Lin-ts’ing, and answers well to our traveller’s text.—H. C.] Duhalde calls T’si-ning chau “one of the most considerable cities of the empire”; and Nieuhoff speaks of its large trade and population. [Sir John F. Davis writes that Tsi-ning chau is a town of considerable dimensions.... “The ma-tow, or platforms, before the principal boats had ornamental gateways over them.... The canal seems to render this an opulent and flourishing place, to judge by the gilded and carved shops, temples, and public offices, along the eastern banks.” (Sketches of China, I. pp. 255–257.)—H. C.]

LXIII. CONCERNING THE CITIES OF LINJU AND PIJU

On leaving the city of Sinju-matu you travel for eight days towards the south, always coming to great and rich towns and villages flourishing with trade and manufactures. The people are all subjects of the Great Kaan, use paper-money, and burn their dead. At the end of those eight days you come to the city of LINJU, in the province of the same name of which it is the capital. It is a rich and noble city, and the men are good soldiers, natheless they carry on great trade and manufactures. There is great abundance of game in both beasts and birds, and all the necessaries of life are in profusion. The place stands on the river of which I told you above. And they have here great numbers of vessels, even greater than those of which I spoke before, and these transport a great amount of costly merchandize{1}.

So, quitting this province and city of Linju, you travel three days more towards the south, constantly finding numbers of rich towns and villages. These still belong to Cathay; and the people are all Idolaters, burning their dead, and using paper-money, that I mean of their Lord the Great Kaan, whose subjects they are. This is the finest country for game, whether in beasts or birds, that is anywhere to be found, and all the necessaries of life are in profusion.

At the end of those three days you find the city of PIJU, a great, rich, and noble city, with large trade and manufactures, and a great production of silk. This city stands at the entrance to the great province of Manzi, and there reside at it a great number of merchants who despatch carts from this place loaded with great quantities of goods to the different towns of Manzi. The city brings in a great revenue to the Great Kaan.{2}

NOTE 1.—Murray suggests that Lingiu is a place which appears in D’Anville’s Map of Shan-tung as Lintching-y, and in Arrowsmith’s Map of China (also in those of Berghaus and Keith Johnston) as Lingchinghien. The position assigned to it, however, on the west bank of the canal, nearly under the 35th degree of latitude, would agree fairly with Polo’s data. [Lin-ch’ing, Lin-tsing, lat. 37° 03′, Playfair’s Dict. No. 4276; Biot, p. 107.—H. C.]

In any case, I imagine Lingiu (of which, perhaps, Lingin may be the correct reading) to be the Lenzin of Odoric, which he reached in travelling by water from the south, before arriving at Sinjumatu. (Cathay, p. 125.)

NOTE 2.—There can be no doubt that this is PEI-CHAU on the east bank of the canal. The abundance of game about here is noticed by Nieuhoff (in Astley, III. 417). [See D. Gandar, Canal Impérial, 1894.—H. C.]

LXIV. CONCERNING THE CITY OF SIJU, AND THE GREAT RIVER CARAMORAN

When you leave Piju you travel towards the south for two days, through beautiful districts abounding in everything, and in which you find quantities of all kinds of game. At the end of those two days you reach the city of SIJU, a great, rich, and noble city, flourishing with trade and manufactures. The people are Idolaters, burn their dead, use paper-money, and are subjects of the Great Kaan. They possess extensive and fertile plains producing abundance of wheat and other grain.{1} But there is nothing else to mention, so let us proceed and tell you of the countries further on.

On leaving Siju you ride south for three days, constantly falling in with fine towns and villages and hamlets and farms, with their cultivated lands. There is plenty of wheat and other corn, and of game also; and the people are all Idolaters and subjects of the Great Kaan.

At the end of those three days you reach the great river CARAMORAN, which flows hither from Prester John’s country. It is a great river, and more than a mile in width, and so deep that great ships can navigate it. It abounds in fish, and very big ones too. You must know that in this river there are some 15,000 vessels, all belonging to the Great Kaan, and kept to transport his troops to the Indian Isles whenever there may be occasion; for the sea is only one day distant from the place we are speaking of. And each of these vessels, taking one with another, will require 20 mariners, and will carry 15 horses with the men belonging to them, and their provisions, arms, and equipments.{2}

Hither and thither, on either bank of the river, stands a town; the one facing the other. The one is called COIGANJU and the other CAIJU; the former is a large place, and the latter a little one. And when you pass this river you enter the great province of MANZI. So now I must tell you how this province of Manzi was conquered by the Great Kaan.{3}

NOTE 1.—SIJU can scarcely be other than Su-t’sien (Sootsin of Keith Johnston’s map) as Murray and Pauthier have said. The latter states that one of the old names of the place was Si-chau, which corresponds to that given by Marco. Biot does not give this name.

The town stands on the flat alluvial of the Hwang-Ho, and is approached by high embanked roads. (Astley, III. 524–525.)

[Sir J. F. Davis writes: “From Sootsien Hien to the point of junction with the Yellow River, a length of about fifty miles, that great stream and the canal run nearly parallel with each other, at an average distance of four or five miles, and sometimes much nearer.” (Sketches of China, I. p. 265.)—H. C.]

NOTE 2.—We have again arrived on the banks of the Hwang-Ho, which was crossed higher up on our traveller’s route to Karájang.

No accounts, since China became known to modern Europe, attribute to the Hwang-Ho the great utility for navigation which Polo here and elsewhere ascribes to it. Indeed, we are told that its current is so rapid that its navigation is scarcely practicable, and the only traffic of the kind that we hear of is a transport of coal in Shan-si for a certain distance down stream. This rapidity also, bringing down vast quantities of soil, has so raised the bed that in recent times the tide has not entered the river, as it probably did in our traveller’s time, when, as it would appear from his account, seagoing craft used to ascend to the ferry north of Hwai-ngan fu, or thereabouts. Another indication of change is his statement that the passage just mentioned was only one day’s journey from the sea, whereas it is now about 50 miles in a direct line. But the river has of late years undergone changes much more material.

In the remotest times of which the Chinese have any record, the Hwang-Ho discharged its waters into the Gulf of Chih-li, by two branches, the most northerly of which appears to have followed the present course of the Pei-ho below Tien-tsing. In the time of the Shang Dynasty (ending B.C. 1078) a branch more southerly than either of the above flowed towards T’si-ning, and combined with the T’si River, which flowed by T’si-nan fu, the same in fact that was till recently called the Ta-t’sing. In the time of Confucius we first hear of a branch being thrown off south-east towards the Hwai, flowing north of Hwai-ngan, in fact towards the embouchure which our maps still display as that of the Hwang-Ho. But, about the 3rd and 4th centuries of our era, the river discharged exclusively by the T’si; and up to the Mongol age, or nearly so, the mass of the waters of this great river continued to flow into the Gulf of Chih-li. They then changed their course bodily towards the Hwai, and followed that general direction to the sea; this they had adopted before the time of our traveller, and they retained it till a very recent period. The mass of Shan-tung thus forms a mountainous island rising out of the vast alluvium of the Hwang-Ho, whose discharge into the sea has alternated between the north and the south of that mountainous tract. (See Map opposite.)

During the reign of the last Mongol emperor, a project was adopted for restoring the Hwang-Ho to its former channel, discharging into the Gulf of Chih-li; and discontents connected with this scheme promoted the movement for the expulsion of the dynasty (1368).

A river whose regimen was liable to such vast changes was necessarily a constant source of danger, insomuch that the Emperor Kia-K’ing in his will speaks of it as having been “from the remotest ages China’s sorrow.” Some idea of the enormous works maintained for the control of the river may be obtained from the following description of their character on the north bank, some distance to the west of Kai-fung fu:

“In a village, apparently bounded by an earthen wall as large as that of the Tartar city of Peking, was reached the first of the outworks erected to resist the Hwang-Ho, and on arriving at the top that river and the gigantic earthworks rendered necessary by its outbreaks burst on the view. On a level with the spot on which I was standing stretched a series of embankments, each one about 70 feet high, and of breadth sufficient for four railway trucks to run abreast on them. The mode of their arrangement was on this wise: one long bank ran parallel to the direction of the stream; half a mile distant from it ran a similar one; these two embankments were then connected by another series exactly similar in size, height, and breadth, and running at right angles to them right down to the edge of the water.”

In 1851, the Hwang-Ho burst its northern embankment nearly 30 miles east of Kai-fung fu; the floods of the two following years enlarged the breach; and in 1853 the river, after six centuries, resumed the ancient direction of its discharge into the Gulf of Chih-li. Soon after leaving its late channel, it at present spreads, without defined banks, over the very low lands of South-Western Shan-tung, till it reaches the Great Canal, and then enters the Ta-t’sing channel, passing north of T’si-nan to the sea. The old channel crossed by Polo in the present journey is quite deserted. The greater part of the bed is there cultivated; it is dotted with numerous villages; and the vast trading town of Tsing-kiang pu was in 1868 extending so rapidly from the southern bank that a traveller in that year says he expected that in two years it would reach the northern bank.

The same change has destroyed the Grand Canal as a navigable channel for many miles south of Lin-t’sing chau. (J. R. G. S. XXVIII. 294–295; Escayrac de Lauture, Mém. sur la Chine; Cathay, p. 125; Reports of Journeys in China, etc. [by Consuls Alabaster, Oxenham, etc., Parl. Blue Book], 1869, pp. 4–5, 14; Mr. Elias in J. R. G. S. XL. p. 1 seqq.)

[Since the exploration of the Hwang-Ho in 1868 by Mr. Ney Elias and by Mr. H. G. Hollingworth, an inspection of this river was made in 1889 and a report published in 1891 by the Dutch Engineers J. G. W. Fijnje van Salverda, Captain P. G. van Schermbeek and A. Visser, for the improvement of the Yellow River.—H. C.]

NOTE 3.—Coiganju will be noticed below. Caiju does not seem to be traceable, having probably been carried away by the changes in the river. But it would seem to have been at the mouth of the canal on the north side of the Hwang-Ho, and the name is the same as that given below (ch. lxxii.) to the town (Kwachau) occupying the corresponding position on the Kiang.

“Khatai,” says Rashiduddin, “is bounded on one side by the country of Máchín, which the Chinese call MANZI.... In the Indian language Southern China is called Mahá-chín, i.e. ‘Great China,’ and hence we derive the word Machin. The Mongols call the same country Nangiass. It is separated from Khatai by the river called KARAMORAN, which comes from the mountains of Tibet and Kashmir, and which is never fordable. The capital of this kingdom is the city of Khingsai, which is forty days’ journey from Khanbalik.” (Quat. Rashid., xci.–xciii.)

MANZI (or Mangi) is a name used for Southern China, or more properly for the territory which constituted the dominion of the Sung Dynasty at the time when the Mongols conquered Cathay or Northern China from the Kin, not only by Marco, but by Odoric and John Marignolli, as well as by the Persian writers, who, however, more commonly call it Máchín. I imagine that some confusion between the two words led to the appropriation of the latter name, also to Southern China. The term Man-tzŭ or Man-tze signifies “Barbarians” (“Sons of Barbarians”), and was applied, it is said, by the Northern Chinese to their neighbours on the south, whose civilisation was of later date.[1] The name is now specifically applied to a wild race on the banks of the Upper Kiang. But it retains its mediæval application in Manchuria, where Mantszi is the name given to the Chinese immigrants, and in that use is said to date from the time of Kúblái. (Palladius in J. R. G. S. vol. xlii. p. 154.) And Mr. Moule has found the word, apparently used in Marco’s exact sense, in a Chinese extract of the period, contained in the topography of the famous Lake of Hang-chau (infra, ch. lxxvi.–lxxvii.)

Though both Polo and Rashiduddin call the Karamoran the boundary between Cathay and Manzi, it was not so for any great distance. Ho-nan belonged essentially to Cathay.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Magaillans says the Southerns, in return, called the Northerns Pe-tai, “Fools of the North”!