Laurence Bergreen

by Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  The brothers had to perform to high standards, because, as Marco explains, they were “bound by contract to give to the court of the Great Khan every day beginning from the month of October until the…month of March a thousand head between beasts and birds, excepting quails.” The requirement kept them busy nearly around the clock, and when March arrived, they fell into a profound stupor to recuperate.

  KUBLAI KHAN himself hunted on an equally grand scale, accompanied by “ten thousand falconers” and “five hundred gerfalcons, and peregrine falcons and saker falcons and other kinds of birds in very great abundance,” in addition to “goshawks in great quantity to catch birds on rivers.” His falconers were well trained and well equipped for the hunt, so as to reflect well on their lord and master.

  Birds belonging to Kublai Khan carried a “little tablet of silver tied to their feet for recognition.” If a bird strayed, it was immediately returned to its master, and the same rigorous policy applied to all the other paraphernalia of the hunt, horses and swords and other equipment. Anyone who found a misplaced item was “held for a thief” unless he promptly returned it to its rightful owner—in most cases a baron. According to Marco, the system, reinforced by drastic penalties, worked efficiently: “No things can be lost that are not soon found and returned.”

  Lesser citizens of the Mongol realm were not entitled to own or hunt with birds of prey: “No merchant nor any craftsman nor any citizen or villager nor any person, whoever he might be, dares keep any goshawk, falcon, nor hawking bird nor hunting dog for his pleasure through [out] all the domain of the Great Khan.” Even Mongol barons and knights had to observe limitations set down by the khan. None “dares to hunt or hawk unless he is enrolled under the captain of the falconers, or has a privilege in this matter.”

  ON THE MORNING of the hunt, the royal party proceeded along a road leading in a southerly direction from Cambulac toward the hunting grounds. Barons and lesser officials traveled on horseback, or walked, while Kublai Khan loomed over all atop one of his four elephants, which were adept at working their way through narrow passes. Befitting his station, he sat within an enclosure (“a beautiful wooden room,” Marco calls it) decorated with the finest silk and beaten-gold ornaments. Kublai rarely strayed from his luxurious perch, Marco confides, because of the painful gout from which he suffered. All the while, twelve barons accompanied him, together with twelve attractive women. “There is no amusement in the world equal to it,” Marco sighs.

  Shielded by the drapes surrounding his private chamber, Kublai Khan conversed with his guests, as barons and knights rode alongside, acting as spotters. Whenever they saw cranes or pheasants overhead, they immediately cried out, “Sir, cranes are passing.” At that, Kublai flung back the curtains and let loose his gerfalcon.

  Looking up, Kublai and his minions squinted to see the streamlined creature streaking like a meteorite across the heavens, tucking its wings and diving until a hapless crane or other bird took notice and vainly tried to elude its attacker. The falcon’s speed always won out, and as the two creatures collided, the falcon sank its razorlike talons into its stunned and helpless prey, engaging it in an intricate airborne dance of death. Locked in their fatal embrace, the birds plummeted to earth, and hunters galloped toward the spot where they fell to recover the falcon as it ravished its prey.

  Lolling atop his elephant, Kublai Khan savored the spectacle of avian combat. “It is a very great amusement and a great delight to him,” Marco attested, “and to all the other barons and knights who also ride round the lord.”

  FATIGUED from his hours of sport, Kublai Khan sought refuge amid the “beautiful and rich” tents and pavilions where his barons, knights, and falconers, together with their wives and concubines, numbering as many as ten thousand, congregated. Some of the tents were large enough to shelter a thousand knights, and each, regardless of size, had its door opening “toward midday,” in accordance with Mongol custom.

  The largest tent connected to the khan’s private lodging, which consisted of two halls and a chamber. Marco left a sumptuous description of the furnishings of Kublai Khan’s splendid dwelling on the remote plain: “Each hall has three posts of spice wood very well worked. They are all covered outside with lion skins that are very beautiful, for they are all striped with black and with white and with red. They are so well arranged that [neither] wind nor rain nor anything else can hurt those inside nor do harm to that skin, because they keep it off very well. And inside those halls and rooms they are all lined with ermine and with sable skins. These are both the most beautiful furs and the most rich and of greater value than any furs that may be…. The skin of the sable, as much as may be lining for one man’s robe, is worth two thousand bezants of gold,…and the Tartars call it in their tongue ‘the king of skins.’…The cords that hold the halls and the room are all of silk. They are of so great value and cost so much, these three tents, that a small king could not pay for them.”

  But Kublai Khan was no “small king.” He was the emperor of the Mongols, the most powerful ruler alive.

  IN FALCONRY, Marco Polo found striking similarities between East and West. In both cultures, falconry had been the sport of the nobility for more than a thousand years. A “swift dog and a splendid hawk,” as one ancient Western phrase has it, were the perquisites of a well-equipped gentleman. Kings and commoners in Asia and Europe alike thrilled to the sight of a bird of prey soaring across a grassy plain as hunters below rode furiously toward their quarry.

  Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen was the most influential of all European falconry enthusiasts. In 1229, he returned to Europe from the Sixth Crusade with a retinue of skilled Arab falconers, who helped to spread the diversion across Europe. During the decades Marco Polo was abroad, Frederick compiled the sport’s bible, De arte venandi cum avibus, or The Art of Falconry, among the earliest works to consider the anatomy of birds. His passion for falconry appears to have exceeded even Kublai Khan’s; Frederick once lost an important military campaign because he decided to go hawking. Dedicated falconers understood his priorities.

  IF MARCO EXPERIENCED disenchantment with Kublai Khan’s excesses and lapses in judgment, he did not admit to it, but he realized that as long as he remained in China he was just another minion of a large-hearted but capricious ruler. Nor did he know how long he would stay. His father and uncle had planned to maintain their steady pace, deliver the message from the pope to Kublai Khan, and return with young Marco to Venice with their gems and silk and other valuable items. But now all three were ensnared in the intrigue of the Mongol court.

  It had taken the Polos more than three years to travel from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan, but they came to realize that it would take much longer to return home. They would have to remain in China for as long as Kublai wished. Although he was nearing seventy, and was grooming his son to succeed him, he gave no sign of relinquishing power. And if he were to die suddenly, his death might pose a serious threat to the Polos, who would lose his personal protection and become vulnerable to the raw violence just below the surface in the Mongol Empire. So they were caught, privileged guests who were also prisoners in the largest kingdom on earth, doomed to serve the Great Khan for an incalculable length of time.

  To survive in this strange land, Marco would have to find a way to make himself useful to the khan, and become a student not just of Mongol women and horsemanship but of the exercise of power. If he succeeded in making a place for himself, there was no telling how high he could rise. For all its peculiarities, Mongol society was open to foreigners who could be useful. He might wind up winning a lordship, or even the governorship of a wealthy province, as other trustworthy foreigners had done. He might rule over thousands as Kublai Khan’s emissary, and even have his own court, with endless opportunities to enrich himself, or keep concubines for his personal pleasure. Or he might fall victim to crude Mongol justice, and never see his homeland again.

  Just when it seemed Marco might have no place at all in
the Mongol Empire, Kublai Khan sent him on the road to collect taxes and, more important, gather information about the realm, so much of which remained unexplored. Within the confines of the empire, Marco’s occupation would bear an eerie similarity to his career before he encountered Kublai Khan: traveler.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Struggle for Survival

  Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

  Through wood and dale the sacred river ran

  Then reached the caverns measureless to man….

  MARCO POLO left Cambulac as Kublai Khan’s emissary. Still in his early twenties, he went without his father and uncle, whom he ceased to mention as companions for this phase of his travels. As always he enjoyed the protection and the blessing of the khan, which guaranteed his safety—at the price of unending loyalty. Despite the challenges that lay ahead, he bristled with newfound self-importance, understandable in light of his destination: Hangzhou, the largest, wealthiest, most celebrated city in China.

  He carried a golden paiza just as his father and uncle had done on their journeys on behalf of the Mongol Empire. This object was a foot long and three inches across, and was inscribed: “By the strength of the eternal Heaven, holy be the Khan’s name. Let him that pays him not reverence be killed.” Possessing it meant that Marco was designated as a very important person in the Mongol realm, and was able to make full use of the khan’s extensive network of hostels, horses, and roads.

  Draped along the shores of West Lake, Hangzhou presented the archetypal Chinese landscape of mountains soaring above a tranquil body of water that seemed to reflect Heaven itself. The metropolis was the traditional seat of the Song dynasty, and it had just been conquered by Kublai Khan’s leading general, Bayan, at the time Marco was dispatched to help administer the khan’s affairs. As a disinterested European, Marco was just the sort of official whom Kublai Khan preferred for overseeing the finances of a hostile or suspicious populace. Everything that Marco had seen since leaving Venice, even the wonders of Cambulac and the great Kublai Khan himself, served as a prologue to his voyage into the heart of China.

  THE TWO CITIES were connected by one of the most massive public works in all of China, the Grand Canal, stretching over a thousand miles from Cambulac south to Hangzhou. The waterway served as a principal artery for Chinese (and Mongol) shipping and commerce. Its construction had been under way, in fits and starts, for centuries, but by the time of Marco’s trip it was nearing completion. Although Marco does not supply a precise itinerary, he probably followed the Grand Canal for much of his journey to Hangzhou.

  Leaving Cambulac, Marco encountered “a very beautiful stone bridge” that crossed a wide, swiftly flowing river, which led to the Ocean Sea. He estimated the bridge to be “three hundred paces long and eight paces wide,” room enough for ten horsemen to ride abreast, clattering on the polished stone. “And it has twenty-four arches and twenty-four piers in the water supporting them,” he says, “and it is all of gray marble and very well worked and well-founded.” The bridge opened onto a vista as spacious as China itself. An impressionable young man could easily persuade himself that the world lay at his feet, and in a sense it did. The bridge, as much a spiritual symbol as an architectural wonder, evoked crossing over into a new realm, a new consciousness, even a new life. As he set foot on it, Marco may have sensed himself growing and changing with every step, as he passed beyond the Mongol stronghold into China itself.

  Crossing the monumental bridge, he considered the care and ingenuity that had gone into its construction. “From one pillar to the other,” he observes, “it is closed in with a flag of gray marble all worked with different sculptures and mortised into the columns at the side, through the length of the bridge to the end, so that people who cross may not be able to fall into the water.” In all, he counted six hundred of these elegant pillars, each topped with a lion or similar animal, fashioned “of very fine marble.”

  Known today as the Marco Polo Bridge, this structure is essentially the same as the day Marco traversed it. Completed in 1192, it is also called the Guangli Bridge, and its stone span reaches across the banks of the Lugou River. Historical records indicate that the Lugou was “violent and flowed extraordinarily rapidly,” but modern construction has diminished the current. The bridge witnessed one of the major engagements of the Second World War, when Japanese forces approached it during their campaign to conquer China.

  THIRTY MILES from the bridge that would one day bear his name, Marco wandered through a charming landscape dotted with attractive, welcoming villages, seductive shade trees, “very fruitful cultivated fields,” refreshing springs, and Buddhist monasteries, where the monks busied themselves weaving silk and fashioning gold jewelry. In a change from his rugged, hazardous journey to Cambulac four years earlier, Marco seems to have felt secure, and he received a courteous reception wherever he went. “There are very many fine inns or hostels in our manner,” he notes with satisfaction, “where the wayfarers lodge, because of the multitude of merchants and strangers who come there.”

  Thereafter, Marco’s account, likely drawn from the notes he brought back to Italy from China, becomes a fast-moving catalog of his “wayfaring” in the service of the khan. Marco traveled from one comfortable inn to another, always appreciative of the “beautiful” villages, cities, fields, and roads jammed with prosperous commercial travelers.

  WHEREVER MARCO WENT, he encountered silk—and not just the fabric but the silkworms themselves, a great novelty to Europeans, and the mulberry trees on which they feasted. For centuries, Europe had known almost nothing about the art and science of sericulture; it was perhaps the most closely guarded secret in ancient history.

  Even within China, the origin of silk was mysterious. Tradition credits Xi Ling-shi—a wife of the mythical Yellow Emperor, said to have ruled China in 3000 BC—with the introduction of silkworm cultivation and the invention of the loom. Although she was a phantom, silk was real; archeological digs have turned up silk threads, ribbons, and cocoons dating from 3000 BC, and a small ivory cup dating from 5000 BC contains images of spinning tools used for silk, as well as silk thread.

  In China, a single cultivated species of moth became identified with silk, the blind and flightless Bombyx mori, whose ancestor Bombyx mandarina Moore fed on the leaves of the white mulberry tree. This silkworm’s thread is composed of a filament that is rounder and smoother than those produced by other moths, and across the millennia, thanks to persistent Chinese sericulture, it evolved into the more specialized Bombyx mori.

  This moth lays as many as five hundred eggs, each weighing no more than a gram or so, within a few days’ time, and promptly dies. From that point, the story of silk can be told in a series of exploding numbers. An ounce of eggs eventually yields thirty thousand silkworms; the worms have one, and only one, source of food: the leaves of the mulberry tree. Those thirty thousand worms devour about a ton of mulberry leaves, and in turn produce twelve pounds of raw silk.

  As the Chinese slowly perfected the cultivation of Bombyx mori, they learned to keep the eggs at 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and to raise the temperature 12 degrees to force them to hatch. Only then does the real work begin: feeding the worms fresh mulberry leaves, handpicked and carefully chopped, every half hour, around the clock, while maintaining a stable temperature. The worms quickly fatten in stacked trays stored in feeding huts; the sound of the munching creatures has been likened to heavy rain falling on a bamboo roof. At the same time, they must be protected from loud noises, drafts, and the odors of fish and meat and even perspiration; under ideal conditions, the coddled creatures can multiply their weight several thousand times, as they continually shed and change color.

  To make their protective cocoons, the silkworms secrete a jellylike substance that hardens on contact with air. Over the course of three or four days, they spin a cocoon around themselves until they look like little puffy white balls about the size of a thumb. These are immersed in boiling water to loosen the silken filaments
, which reach about half a mile in length, and the filaments, in turn, are gathered onto a spool.

  There are two distinct types of silk cocoon. Cocoons of one type produce a filament about one-eighth the diameter of a human hair. The filament possesses tremendous tensile strength because of its molecular structure, known as a beta-pleated sheet, which looks like this:

  A single silk thread generally consists of five to eight of these filaments tightly wound together. After processing, the raw threads are ready for dyeing. Because dye fits neatly into the pleats, silk retains color far better than other natural fabrics can; colors look much richer and more vibrant on the sensuous surface of silk.

  The other type of silk cocoon, much larger and fluffier, often goes by the name of Happy Family, because each cocoon contains two larvae. The filaments in this case are tangled together, and so are less valuable. Once it has been stretched over a form to dry, the silk is used for batting—warm, lightweight stuffing.

  IN CHINA, the manufacture of silk was quintessentially women’s work; in the spring, the reigning empress inaugurated the silk season as part of her official duties, and her female subjects followed suit, spinning and weaving and embroidering silk at home and in workshops. In silk-rich regions, three generations of women in the same family would feed and supervise the maturing silkworms. The production of silk, labor-intensive as it was—with spinning, weaving, dyeing, and embroidering—occupied half of China’s provinces. Despite the ubiquity of silk manufacture, the key techniques of sericulture remained closely guarded by Chinese authorities; it was an offense punishable by death to reveal those secrets to foreigners, or to smuggle cocoons or even eggs beyond Chinese borders.