Nor is it only palaces which Marco Polo describes, for he tells of the great canal and inland river trade of China, the exports and imports at its harbours, the paper money, the system of posts and caravanserais, which linked it together. He gives an unsurpassed picture of that huge, rich, peaceful empire, full of wealth and commerce and learned men and beautiful things, and of its ruler Kublai Khan, one of the noblest monarchs who ever sat upon a throne, who, since 'China is a sea that salts all the rivers that flow into it,'[[21]] was far more than a barbarous Mongol khan, was in very truth a Chinese emperor, whose house, called by the Chinese the 'Yuan Dynasty', takes its place among the great dynasties of China.
Even more than Marco Polo tells us he must, indeed, have seen. The impersonality of the greater part of the book is its one blemish, for we would fain know more of how he lived in China. There is some evidence that he consorted with the Mongol conquerors rather than with the Chinese, and that Chinese was not one of the languages which he learned. He makes no mention of several characteristic Chinese customs, such as the compressed feet of the women, and fishing with cormorants (both of which are described by Ordoric of Pordenone after him); he travelled through the tea districts of Fo-kien, but he never mentions tea-drinking, and he has no word to say even of the Great Wall.[[22]] And how typical a European he is, in some ways, for all his keen interest in new and strange things. 'They are,' he says of the peaceful merchants and scholars of Suchow, 'a pusillanimous race and solely occupied with their trade and manufactures. In these indeed they display considerable ability, and if they were as enterprising, manly, and warlike as they are ingenious, so prodigious is their number that they might not only subdue the whole of the province, but carry their rule further still.'[[23]] Nearly five hundred years later we find the same judgement expressed in different words: 'Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.' The answer is a question: Would you rather be the pusillanimous Chinese, who painted the landscape roll of which a portion is reproduced opposite page 52, or the enterprising, manly, and warlike European of the same period, whose highest achievement in pictorial art is the picture of Marco Polo's embarkation, reproduced opposite page 21? What is civilization and what progress? Yet Marco Polo shows himself throughout his book far from unable to appreciate other standards than those of his own land and religion, for of Sakya-muni Buddha he says that, 'had he been a Christian he would have been a great saint of our Lord Jesus Christ,' and he could honour Kublai as that great Khan deserved.
Nevertheless, although Marco Polo shows less knowledge of the Chinese than one might expect from the extraordinary detail and fidelity of his observation in other directions, he must have known many of these charming and cultivated people, at Kinsai or Cambaluc, or at the city which he governed. Among others, he must have known the great artist who painted the roll mentioned above, Chao Mêng-fu, whom the Chinese called 'Sung ksüeh Tao jen' or the 'Apostle of Pine Trees and Snow'. He was a lineal descendant of the founder of the Sung dynasty and a hereditary official. When that dynasty at last fell before the Tartars, he and his friend Ch'ien Hsüan, 'the Man of the Jade Pool and Roaring Torrent', retired into private life. But in 1286 Chao Mêng-fu was summoned to court by Kublai Khan, and, to the indignation of his friend, returned and became secretary in the Board of War, occupying his time in this post (what must Marco Polo have thought of him!) in painting his marvellous pictures. He became a great favourite of the Khan and was always about the court, and Marco Polo must have known him well and perhaps have watched him at work painting those matchless landscapes, and those pictures of horses and men for which he was famous. Marco loved horses, as, indeed, he loved all kinds of sport (of which he had plenty, for the Khan was a great hunter and hawker), and he has left a word picture of the white brood mares at Shansi, which may be set beside Chao Mêng-fu's brush picture of the 'Eight Horses in the Park of Kublai Khan'.[[24]] He knew, too, perhaps Chao Mêng-fu's wife, the Lady Kuan, who painted most exquisitely the graceful bamboo and the peony, so loved by Chinese artists, and of whom it is related that 'she would watch the moving shadows of the sprays thrown by the moon on the paper windows, and transfer the fugitive outlines to paper with a few strokes of her supple brush, so that every smallest scrap of her work was mounted in albums as models for others to copy'.[[25]] Chao Mêng-fu and the Lady Kuan had a son, Chao Yung, who is of special interest to us, for he painted a picture of a Tangut hunter, and Marco Polo has also given a description of the Tartar horsemen and of the province of Tangut, where he saw and described the musk deer and the yak.
But we must return to the history of the Polos in China. From time to time in Marco's book we hear also of his father and uncle, travelling about the empire, growing rich by trade, and amassing a store of those jewels, in the value of which they were so skilled, even helping the Khan to reduce a rebel town, by constructing siege engines for him on the European model, handy Venetians that they were, who could lay their hands to anything.[[27]] Without doubt they were proud of their Marco, who from an inquisitive lad had grown to so wise and observant a man, and had risen to so high a position. So for seventeen years the three Polos abode in the Khan's service in China. The long months slipped by; and at last they began to feel upon them a longing to see Venice and the lagoons again, and to hear Mass once more beneath the majestic roof of St Mark's before they died. Moreover, Kublai Khan was growing old himself, and the favour which he had always shown to them had excited some jealousy among his own people, and they feared what might happen when he died. But the old Khan was adamant to all their prayers; wealth and honours were theirs for the asking, but he would not let them go. They might, indeed, have died in China, and we of the West might never have heard of Marco Polo or of Kublai Khan, but for a mere accident, a stroke of fate, which gave them their chance. In 1286 Arghun, the Khan of Persia, lost by death his favourite wife Bolgana, and, according to her dying wish, he sent ambassadors to the Court of Peking to ask for another bride from her own Mongol tribe. Their overland route home again was endangered by a war, and they therefore proposed to return by sea. Just at that moment, Marco Polo happened to return from a voyage on which he had been sent, and spoke with such assurance of the ease with which it had been accomplished, that the three ambassadors conceived a strong desire to take with them all three of these ingenious Venetians, who seemed to know so much about ships. Thus it was that the great Khan was prevailed upon, very reluctantly, to let them go.
Early in 1292 they set sail from the busy port of Zaiton in fourteen big Chinese junks (of which Marco, writing of the shipping of the Indian and China seas, has left an excellent description),[[28]] with the three envoys, the princess, a beautiful girl of seventeen, 'moult bèle dame at avenant,' says Marco, who had an eye for pretty ladies, and a large suite of attendants. One version of Marco's book says that they took with them also the daughter of the king of Mansi, one of those Sung princesses who in happier days had wandered beside the lake in Hangchow, and who had no doubt been brought up at Cambaluc by the care of Kublai Khan's favourite queen, the Lady Jamui. The voyage was a long and difficult one; they suffered lengthy delays in Sumatra, Ceylon, and Southern India, occupied by Marco in studying the sea charts of the coast of India which the Arab pilots showed him, and adding to his knowledge of these parts, which he had already visited. Thus it was over two years before the junks reached Persia, and two of the three envoys and a large number of their suite had died by the way. When at last they landed, it was found that Arghun, the prospective bridegroom, had meanwhile died too, leaving his throne in the charge of a regent for his young son. But on the regent's advice a convenient solution of the difficulty was found by handing the princess over to this prince, and Marco and his uncles duly conducted her to him in the province of Timochain, where Marco Polo noticed that the women were 'in my opinion the most beautiful in the world', where stood the famed and solitary arbor secco, and where men still told tales of great Alexander and Darius. There they took leave of their princess, who had come on the long voyage to love them like fathers, so Marco says, and wept sorely when they parted. It was while they were still in Persia, where they stayed for nine months after handing over the princess, that the Polos received news of the death of the Great Khan whom they had served so faithfully for so many years. He died at the ripe age of eighty, and with his death a shadow fell over central Asia, darkening the shining yellow roofs of Cambaluc,
the barren plains
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With sails and wind their cany waggons light,
the minarets of Persia, and the tents of wild Kipchak Tartars, galloping over the Russian steppes. So wide had been the sway of Kublai Khan. A shadow fell also upon the heart of Marco Polo. It was as though a door had clanged to behind him, never to open again. 'In the course of their journey,' he says, 'our travellers received intelligence of the Great Khan having departed this life, which entirely put an end to all prospects of their revisiting those regions.' So he and his elders went on by way of Tabriz, Trebizond, and Constantinople to Venice, and sailed up to the city of the lagoons at long last at the end of 1295.
A strange fairy-tale legend has come down to us about the return of the Polos. 'When they got thither,' says Ramusio, who edited Marco's book in the fifteenth century, 'the same fate befell them as befell Ulysses, who when he returned after his twenty years' wanderings to his native Ithaca was recognized by nobody.' When, clad in their uncouth Tartar garb, the three Polos knocked at the doors of the Ca' Polo, no one recognized them, and they had the greatest difficulty in persuading their relatives and fellow-Venetians that they were indeed those Polos who had been believed dead for so many years. The story goes that they satisfactorily established their identity by inviting all their kinsmen to a great banquet, for each course of which they put on a garment more magnificent than the last, and finally, bringing in their coarse Tartar coats, they ripped open the seams and the lining thereof, 'upon which there poured forth a great quantity of precious stones, rubies, sapphires, carbuncles, diamonds, and emeralds, which had been sewn into each coat with great care, so that nobody could have suspected that anything was there.... The exhibition of such an extraordinary and infinite treasure of jewels and precious stones, which covered the table, once more filled all present with such astonishment that they were dumb and almost beside themselves with surprise: and they at once recognized these honoured and venerated gentlemen in the Ca' Polo, whom at first they had doubted and received them with the greatest honour and reverence.[[29]] Human nature has changed little since the thirteenth century. The precious stones are a legend, but no doubt the Polos brought many with them, for they were jewel merchants by trade; they had had ample opportunities for business in China, and the Great Khan had loaded them with 'rubies and other handsome jewels of great value' to boot. Jewels were the most convenient form in which they could have brought home their wealth. But the inquiring Marco brought other things also to tickle the curiosity of the Venetians, as he lets fall from time to time in his book. He brought, for example, specimens of the silky hair of the Tangut yak, which his countrymen much admired, the dried head and feet of a musk deer, and the seeds of a dye plant (probably indigo) from Sumatra, which he sowed in Venice, but which never came up, because the climate was not sufficiently warm.[[30]] He brought presents also for the Doge; for an inventory made in 1351 of things found in the palace of Marino Faliero includes among others a ring given by Kublai Khan, a Tartar collar, a three-bladed sword, an Indian brocade, and a book 'written by the hand of the aforesaid Marco,' called De locis mirabilibus Tartarorum.[[31]]
The rest of Marco Polo's life is quickly told. The legend goes that all the youth of Venice used to resort to the Ca' Polo in order to hear his stories, for not even among the foreign sailors on the quays, where once the boy Marco had wandered and asked about the Tartars, were stories the like of his to be heard. And because he was always talking of the greatness of Kublai Khan's dominions, the millions of revenue, the millions of junks, the millions of riders, the millions of towns and cities, they gave him a nickname and jestingly called him Marco Milione, or Il Milione, which is, being interpreted, 'Million Marco'; and the name even crept into the public documents of the Republic, while the courtyard of his house became known as the Corte Milione. To return from legend to history, the ancient rivalry between Venice and Genoa had been growing during Marco Polo's absence, nor had Venice always prevailed. Often as her galleys sailed,
dipping deep
For Famagusta and the hidden sun
That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire, ...
Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,
The pirate Genoese
Hell raked them till they rolled
Blood, water, fruit, and corpses up the hold.