The breadth and depth and length and merchandise of the Pulisangan and the Caramaran are only less than the Kiang's; from the point where Marco crossed the second of these, there was not another bridge till it reached the ocean, hundreds of miles away, "by reason of its exceeding greatness."
Lastly Pekin, the capital of the Empire, with Quinsai and the other provincial capitals of Mangi and Cathay, call out the unbounded admiration of the Polos as of every other Western traveller, from the Moslem Ibn Batuta to the Christian friars of the fourteenth century.
Pekin, two days' journey from the ocean, the residence of the Court in December, January, and February, in the extreme north-east of Cathay, had been lately rebuilt in a "central square of twenty-four miles in compass, and twelve suburbs, three or four miles long, adjoining each of the twelve gates," where merchants and strangers lived, each nation with separate "burses" or store-houses, where they lodged. From this centre to the land of Gog and Magog and the champaign-land of Bargu, the Great Khan travelled every year in midsummer for the fresh air of the plateau country of central Asia, as well as for a better view of the great Russian and Bactrian sub-kingdoms of his House. The six months of spring and autumn were spent in slow progresses through central and southern China to Thibet on one side, and to Tonquin on the other. But greater even than Pekin, Quinsai, or Kansay, the City of Heaven, in southern China, though no longer the capital even of a separate Kingdom of Mangi, was the crowning work of Chinese civilisation. It surpassed the other cities of Kublai, as much as these overshadowed the Rome or Venice of the thirteenth century.
"In the world there is not its like, for by common report it is one hundred miles in circuit, with a lake on one side and a river on the other, divided in many channels and upon these and the canals adjoining twelve thousand bridges of stone; there are ten market places, each half a mile square; great store-houses of stone, where the Indian merchants lay by their goods; palaces and gardens on both sides of the main street, which, like all the highways in Mangi, is paved with stone on each side, and in the midst full of gravel, with passages for the water, which keeps it always clean." Salt, silk, fruit, precious stones, and cloth of gold are the chief commodities; the paper money of the Great Khan is used everywhere; all the people, except a few Nestorians and Moslems, are "idolaters, so luxurious and so happy that a man would think himself in Paradise."
It was only in recent years that Kublai, or his general, Baian, had captured Quinsai and driven out the King of Mangi with his seraglio and his friends. The exile till then had only thought of pleasure, of wine, women, and song, the "sweet meat which cost him the sour sauce ye have heard," on the approach of danger, had fled on board the ships he had prepared to "certain impregnable isles in the ocean," and if these impregnable islands may be identified with Zipangu or Japan, the conquerors pursued him even here. There is nothing more interesting in Polo's book than his story of the Mongol failure in the Eastern islands, fifteen hundred miles from the coast of Mangi, now first discovered to Christian knowledge.
This country of Japan, "very great, the people white, of gentle manners, idolaters in religion, under a King of their own," was attacked by Kublai's fleet in 1264 for the gold they had, and had in such plenty that "the King's house, windows, and floors were covered with it, as churches here with lead, as was reported by merchants—but these were few and the King allowed no exportation of the gold."
The expedition was as disastrous a failure as the old Athenian attack upon Sicily, and was not repeated, although fleets were sent by the Great Khan after this into the Southern Seas, which were supposed to have made a discovery of Papua, if not of the Australian Continent. "In this Sea of China, over against Mangi," Marco reported, from hearsay "of mariners and expert pilots, are 7440 islands, most of them inhabited, whereon grows no tree that yields not a pleasant smell—spices, lignum-aloes, and pepper, black and white." The ships of Zaitum (the great Chinese mart for Indian trade) knew this sea and its islands, "for they go every winter and return every summer, taking a year on the voyage, and all this though it is far from India and not subject to the Great Khan."
But not only did Polo in these sections of his Guide Book or Memories of Travel, record the main features of a coast and ocean scarcely guessed at by Europeans, and flatly denied by Ptolemy and the main traditional school of Western geography. In his service under Kublai, and in his return by sea to Aden and Suez, he opened up the eight provinces of Thibet, the whole of south-east Asia from Canton to Bengal, and the great archipelago of further India.
Four days' journey beyond the Yang-Tse-Kiang, Marco entered "the wide country of Thibet, vanquished and wasted by the Khan for the space of twenty days' journey, and become a wilderness wanting inhabitants, where wild beasts are excessively increased." Here he tells us of the Yak-oxen and great Thibetan dogs as great as asses, of the musk deer, and spices, "and salt lakes having beds of pearls," and of the cruel and bestial idolatry and social customs of the people.
Still farther to the south-west, Commissioner Polo came to the Cinnamon river, called Brius, on the borders of the province of Caindu, to the porcelain-making districts of Carazan, governed by Kublai's son, and so to Bengal, "which borders upon India," and where Marco laughs at the tattoo customs of "flesh embroidery for the dyeing of fools' skins."