Laurence Bergreen

by Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  With gusto, he describes the European machinery’s devastating effect on the Chinese fortress. “When the trebuchets were set up before the city of Siang-yang-fu and drawn, each one threw a stone of three hundred pounds into the town. The stone that the mangonel first shot struck into the houses and broke and ruined everything, and made great noise and great tumult.”

  Under attack from the strange engines, the inhabitants of Siang-yang-fu panicked. “Every day they threw a very great number of stones, by which many were killed. And when the men of the city saw this misfortune, which they had never seen nor heard [before], they were so dismayed by it and so alarmed that they did not know what they ought to say or do,” Marco gloats, “and they believed that this was done to them by enchantment, for it seemed that the bolts came from the sky.” Surrender became inevitable. “They wished to give themselves up in the way that the other cities…had done, and…were willing to be under the rule of the Great Khan. The lord of the army said he was quite willing for this. And then he received them, and those of the city gave themselves up like other cities.”

  Marco boasts about the role that he and his family had supposedly played in the Mongol victory: “And that happened by the kindness of Master Niccolò and Master Maffeo and Master Marco Polo, son of Master Niccolò Polo, as you have heard. This solution…increased the fame and credit of these two Venetian brothers in the sight of the Great Khan and all the court.”

  The Mongol victory at Siang-yang-fu remains one of the outstanding tales in Marco’s account, but with its departure from the facts as recorded in Chinese annals, its unusually bellicose tone, and its chronological impossibility, it also remains the episode most open to question. Nevertheless, the military contest did occur, and the annals indicate that the Mongols did, in fact, employ “foreign engineers” to lay siege to the city. Marco, however, could not have been among them. To give Marco his due, it is possible that his father and uncle participated in some phase of the siege on their previous trip. Yet at least three early manuscripts of the Travels fail to mention the siege at all. It seems more likely that this stirring episode was added by Rustichello, seeking to aggrandize the role played by the young tax collector and his elders in the making of the Mongol Empire. Even if the romance writer played false with history, he accomplished his literary aims.

  AS MARCO veered back toward the east, heading for Hangzhou, he traveled the rivers of China. Although he was familiar with the sight of the canals of Venice teeming with watercraft, nothing had prepared him for the sight of the immense Qiantang River, as it is known today, “pursuing its course…more than a hundred and twenty days’ journey before it enters the sea, into which river enter infinite other rivers, all navigable, which run in different directions and swell and increase their turns to such a size.” The sheer size of the river—actually an estuary—inspired Marco to state, with accuracy, that it flowed through “so many regions, and there are so many cities upon it,” that watercraft traveling along contained cargo “of greater value” than on “all the rivers of Christendom,” and, on further thought, of greater value than on “all their seas.”

  He cites a source for his claim: inspectors who “keep account for their lord” told him that more than five thousand watercraft traveled on the river each year, but he did not simply take their word for it. He asserts: “I tell you that I saw there at one time when I was in the city of Singiu fifteen thousand boats at once that all sail by this river, which is so broad that it does not seem to be a river but a sea.” The number referred to vessels in just one city, as difficult as Europeans would find that to believe.

  Marco was particularly attentive to waterborne commerce because, it appeared, “the chief merchandise that is carried upon this river is salt, which the merchants load in this city and carry through whatever regions are upon this river, and also inland.” As a tax assessor, he was doing his job, following the salt, but he also noted that boats did a brisk trade in wood, charcoal, hemp, “and many other different wares with which the regions near the seashore are supplied.” The abundance was enough to overwhelm even the most jaded merchant of Venice.

  These boats enthralled him—not just their number, but their variety, and their construction. Patrolling the docks, he took advantage of his position to study their construction and fittings at close range, as if plotting his eventual escape from the Mongol Empire aboard one of them. “They are covered with only one deck and have only one mast with one sail, but they are of great tonnage,” he reports. And he describes their rigging with great detail and expertise: “All the ships have not all the tackle of ropes of hemp, except indeed that they have the masts and the sails rigged with them. But I tell you that they have the hawsers, or, to speak plainly, the tow-lines of nothing else but of canes, with which the ships are towed upstream by this river…. Each of these ships has eight or ten or twelve horses which tow it through the river against the stream, and also with it.”

  One day, perhaps, a similar ship might carry him from China to Venice and freedom.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The City of Heaven

  So twice five miles of fertile ground

  With walls and towers were girdled round….

  “WHEN ONE is gone riding for three days, then one finds the most noble and magnificent city that for its excellence, importance, and beauty is called Quinsai, which means the City of Heaven,” Marco Polo records. “It is the greatest city that may be found in the world, where so many pleasures may be found that one fancies himself to be in Paradise.”

  Marco had arrived at the apogee of Chinese civilization, a city so advanced, so beautiful, so filled with sensual pleasures that he would scarcely be able to convince skeptical Europeans that it was not some insubstantial vision, but as real as Venice. Like Venice, Quinsai was built around a series of canals in which boats of every type jostled against each other. No wonder Marco believed that he had arrived in a more highly evolved version of his native city.

  Hangzhou, as the city is known today, captivated Marco as did no other place in Asia. For the first time, he encountered the grandeur of China at its most advanced, unspoiled by the Mongols. In Quinsai, he arrived at a breathtaking future, as unreal to him as some science fiction fantasy would be to a time traveler of today, yet it was tangible and vital. For once, he saw himself not just as a wayfarer but as an explorer, and he set out take the measure of this urban marvel. “I, Master Marco Polo,” he proclaims, “was in this city many times and determined with great diligence to notice and understand all the conditions of the place, describing them in my notes.”

  The inhabitants of Quinsai resisted opening hearth and home to a foreigner such as Marco, who, in their eyes, represented the invading Mongols. Also, he had never acquired an understanding of Chinese. As a result of those barriers, much of the city’s inner life, spiritual and sexual, eluded his inquiry. Yet his curiosity impelled him to learn more about the city and its people than any other European before him.

  He never offered a full account of why he went to the great capital, or what duties he performed there. Most likely, he served as a tax assessor and collector not long after Kublai Khan’s trusted general, Bayan, conquered the city. In some versions of the Travels, Marco claims that he held the post of governor of Hangzhou, and skeptics of his account have seized on this as a prime example of his tendency to inflate his experience outrageously. Yet in other versions, Marco says only that he visited the city repeatedly in his capacity as a tax assessor, and sat on a city council. Both assertions are plausible. In any event, his dazzling descriptions of the city speak for themselves.

  How did a Venetian manage to infiltrate and decode the immense, advanced, and complex city? His forays into alien cultures often yielded mixed results, yet his account of Quinsai demonstrates a mastery of detail and uncanny accuracy. The answer is that he received expert help, as he explains: “I will follow the account of it [Quinsai] sent in writing by the queen of the realm to Bayan, the conqueror of the province, w
hen he was besieging it. This was for him to pass on to the Great Khan, so that, learning of its magnificence, he might not let it be sacked or laid waste.” In other words, Marco enjoyed access to the flow of Mongol intelligence about the city. He is silent concerning the language of this valuable document. It may have been in Persian, which he knew well, or in one of the Mongol tongues with which he was familiar. In either case, his consideration of Quinsai is more than a patchwork of quotations; he brought his own observations to bear, so that he could confidently state, “It is all true, as I, Marco Polo, later saw clearly with my own eyes.”

  MARCO LAUNCHES INTO a fervid account of Quinsai, a city “so large that in circuit it is…a hundred miles around or thereabouts, because the streets and canals in it are very wide and large.” Proceeding to bring this unknown metropolis to life for his skeptical Western readers, he says, “Then there are squares where they hold market, which on account of the vast multitudes that meet in them are necessarily very large and spacious.”

  The more Marco pondered this metropolis, with its canals and bridges and constant waterborne traffic teeming with commerce on a scale that his readers would not have believed possible, the more eloquent his reportage became. “It has on one side,” he continues, “a lake of fresh water [West Lake] that is very clear, and on the other there is an enormous river which, by entering by many great and small canals that run in every part of the city, both takes away all impurities and then enters the lake…. This makes the air very wholesome; and one can go all about the city by land and by these streams. The streets and canals are so great that boats are able to travel there conveniently and carts to carry the things necessary for the inhabitants.”

  Marco stumbles when he comes to estimate the number of bridges in the City of Heaven: “There is a story that it has 12,000 bridges, great and small, for the most part of stone, and some are built of wood. And for each of these bridges, or for the most part, a great and large ship could easily pass under the arch of it; and for the others smaller ships could pass. But those that are made over the principal canals and the chief streets are arched so high and with such skill that a boat can pass under them with a mast, and yet there pass over them carriages and horses, so well are the streets inclined to fit the height.” The actual number of bridges in Quinsai came to 347, not 12,000 as Marco states, a discrepancy that would furnish the doubters with ammunition. But as the context makes clear, “12,000 bridges” is not meant to be taken literally. He simply wants to impress upon readers that there were more bridges in Quinsai than he could tally, more, even, than in Venice. “And let no one be surprised if there are so many bridges,” he goes on, “because I tell you that this town is all…lagoons as Venice is, and also all surrounded by water, and so it is needful that there may be so many bridges for this, that people may be able to go through the town both inside and out by land.”

  Nor were bridges the only engineering marvel of Quinsai. The city’s enormous moat was “perhaps forty miles long.” Marco relates that it was made “by order of those ancient kings of that province so as to be able to draw off the river into it every time that it rose above the banks; and it serves also as a defense for the city, and the earth that was dug out was put on the inner side, which makes the likeness of a little hill that surrounds it.”

  Marco again strained credulity with his description of Quinsai’s sprawl, although it was entirely accurate. “There are ten principal open spaces, besides infinite others for the districts, which are square, that is, half a mile for a side,” he writes. “And along the front street of those there is a main street forty paces wide, which runs straight from one end of the city to the other with many bridges that cross it level and conveniently; and every four miles is found one of those squares such as have two miles (as has been said) of circuit.”

  He took note of Quinsai’s celebrated Grand Canal—“a very broad canal that runs parallel to the street at the back of the squares”—without realizing that he was gazing upon the longest artificial waterway in China. The Grand Canal connected major rivers from Quinsai to Cambulac, a distance of a thousand miles. It was an ancient artery, at least a thousand years old by the time Marco visited. Originally a casual network of waterways, the Grand Canal became a unified entity after an inspection tour undertaken by Emperor Yang Ti of the Sui dynasty in AD 604. Over the next six years, three million laborers expanded the Grand Canal, largely by hand. The sacrifice was enormous; half the workforce perished, and eventually the Sui dynasty collapsed as a result. But the canal survived.

  BY EUROPEAN STANDARDS, Quinsai’s varied population was as incredible as its size. Marco tells of a profusion of people and goods that would have amazed those accustomed to life on a more intimate scale: “Three days a week, there is a concourse of from forty to fifty thousand persons who come to market and bring everything you can desire for food, because there is always a great supply of victuals; of game, that is to say, of roebuck, red-deer, fallow-deer, hare, rabbit, and of birds, partridges, pheasant, francolin, quail, fowl, capon, and more ducks and geese than can be told; for they rear so many of them in [West] Lake that for one Venetian groat”—a thick silver coin of modest value, whose name derived from the Italian grosso, or large—“may be had a pair of geese and two pair of ducks.”

  As Marco wandered past the market stalls, rubbing shoulders with enough shoppers to populate several European cities, he marveled at the profusion of goods on display, the likes of which he had never seen in the West—“all sorts of vegetables and fruits, and above all the rest immense pears, which weigh ten pounds apiece, which are white inside like a paste, and very fragrant; peaches in their seasons, yellow and white, very delicate.”

  The abundance of fresh produce available was exceeded only by the quantity of fish. Each day, Marco reports, it arrived fresh from the “Ocean Sea up the river for the space of twenty-five miles,” all of it supplemented by equally succulent fish from West Lake, although this was not as desirable, “because of the impurities that come from the city” polluting the lake water. “Whoever saw this quantity of fish would never think that it could be sold, and yet in a few hours it has all been taken away, so great is the multitude of the inhabitants who are used to live delicacies; for they eat both fish and flesh at the same meal.”

  DESPITE MARCO’S tendency to embellish, the City of Heaven was emphatically real. Contemporaneous accounts by outsiders who managed to reach Quinsai all emphasized the city’s overwhelming size, prosperity, and beauty, and acclaimed Quinsai the greatest in all the world.

  The Persian historian Vassaf, writing about Quinsai in 1300, described very much the same city Marco experienced and loved—its great size, broad streets, and abundance.

  Quinsai, which is the principal city of the country of Matchin and which seems a paradise of which the sky forms the ground, extends in length so that its circumference is approximately twenty-four parasangs [about fifteen kilometers]. Its pavement is made of baked bricks and stones; it contains many houses and buildings built in wood and decorated with beautiful paintings of all kinds. From one end of the city to the other three post stations have been established. The largest of the streets is, it is said, three parasangs in length, and contains sixty pavilions of a uniform architecture, sustained by pillars of the same proportions. The revenue from the tax on salt amounts daily to 700 balichs of tchao [paper money]. The number of people who exercise different professions is truly prodigious: it has been calculated that there are thirty-two thousand cloth dyers; one can judge from that about the other kinds of industry. Seven hundred thousand soldiers and an equal number of inhabitants are recorded in the offices of numbering and on the registers of the chancellorship. In addition, the city contains seven hundred temples which resemble fortresses, each inhabited by a number of priests without faith, monks without religion, as well as by a multitude of workers, guards, servants, idolaters with their families and people of their suites. All these men are not mentioned in the census, and they are not subject
to the payment of taxes and levies. Forty thousand soldiers are devoted to guarding the city and serving as sentinels.

  Confirming Marco Polo’s impressions, Vassaf wrote:

  For the comfort of this immense population, boats and barks of all kinds circulate continually on the waters in such a great number that imagination cannot conceive an idea of it, and the more so because it would be impossible to calculate their numbers.

  A very different visitor, Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan friar, arrived forty years after Marco Polo’s time, and, like Marco, cast off all restraint in describing the wonders he experienced there.

  It is the greatest city in the whole world. It is a hundred miles around, and in all this great space there is no empty area which is not fully inhabited by people; and there are many houses which have ten families or more; this city has many suburbs and more people than any other city. It has ten principal gates, and adjacent to each of its gates are eight large cities, much larger than the city of Venice; and from these gates to these cities, run continuous roads, so that a man can well go six or eight days and it will seem that he has only gone a little way, because he will always have gone among towns and houses.

  Like Marco, Odoric saw Quinsai as the Asian Venice, but bigger and better.

  This city is located on a low plain, between lakes, seas and swamps, like the city of Venice. There are more than seven thousand bridges, and at each bridge there are people guarding it on behalf of the Khan.