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.
Odoric estimated that Quinsai was home to 850,000 households, which made for a population of over a million and a half, just as Marco claimed. “Whoever would write of this city would fill a great book,” the friar concluded, unaware that Marco Polo’s chronicle had already fulfilled this prophecy. “But in brief it is the greatest that there is in the world and the most noble.”
The most celebrated traveler in the Muslim world, Ibn Battutah, is said to have arrived in Quinsai in 1340, more than fifty years after Marco. By that time, the City of Heaven had become even larger, with a more visible European population, including prominent Jewish and Muslim communities. “We entered the said city, which is divided into six towns; each has its separate wall, and a great wall circles all of them. In the first town live the guards of the city with their commander,” he wrote.
The next day we entered the second town through a door called the Door of the Jews; this town is inhabited by the Israelites, the Christians, and the Turks, adorers of the sun; they are very numerous. The Emir of this town is Chinese, and we spent the second night in his house. The third day, we made our entry into the third town, and this is occupied by the Moslems. It is beautiful; the markets here are disposed as in the Islamic countries; it contains mosques and muezzins; we heard the latter call the faithful to midday prayer when we entered the town.
The ethnic variety of Quinsai, unremarked by earlier visitors, reflected the ascendancy of the Mongols, who invited “the Israelites, the Christians, and the Turks” to settle and trade in the great city.
THE CITY OF HEAVEN’S celebrated joie de vivre centered on the numerous public bathhouses and their courtesans. The locals, both men and women, availed themselves of the cold-water baths, “recommended for health,” as Marco slyly notes, while foreigners made use of the hot baths, where alluring serving maids offered their clients more than simple hygiene. These women, reeking of “sumptuous perfumes,” he says, “are very clever and practiced in knowing how to flatter and coax with ready words and suited to each kind of person, so that the foreigners who have once indulged themselves with them can never forget them…. It comes to pass that when they return home in front of they say they have been to Quinsai, that is, the City of Heaven, and count the hours until they be able to return there.”
Combining a market and a brothel, Quinsai also had the air of a perpetual carnival. One memoirist who came of age there never forgot the man who trained his fish to perform.
He has a large lacquer bowl in front of him in which swim turtles, turbots, and other fish. He beats time on a small bronze gong and calls up one of the creatures by name. It comes immediately and dances on the surface, wearing a kind of little hat on its head…. There is also an archery expert who sets up in front of the spectators a big wheel a yard and a half in diameter, with all sorts of objects, flowers, birds, and people painted on it. He announces that he is going to hit this or that object, and having started spinning it rapidly, he shoots his arrows through the midst of the spectators. He hits the exact spot he has declared he will hit. He can even score a hit on the most precisely defined spots of the spinning target, such as a particular feather in a particular wing of a bird.
The memoirist wandered in a daze among snake charmers blowing on little pipes, luring their hideous charges from the bamboo baskets where they coiled in darkness; and a Taoist monk who carried a trap filled with multicolored shellfish, which he claimed he had hypnotized. Boxers abounded, as did chess players, poets, writers of light verse, acrobats, and magicians. A Chinese record of the era lists five hundred and fifty-four performers who appeared at court, grouped into fifty-five categories, including kite flyers and ball players, magicians and singers, impressionists, archers, and bawdy raconteurs.
THE GREAT rectangular palaces looming over this frenzied activity caused Marco to tilt his head upward, to take in their lush gardens, “and nearby them, houses of artisans who work in their shops.” He writes that “at all hours are met people who are going up and down on their business, so that to see a great crowd anyone would believe that it would not be possible that victuals are found enough to be able to feed it; and yet every market day all the squares are covered and filled with people and merchants who bring them both on carts and on boats, and all is disposed of.”
He sensed the order underlying this apparent chaos, the existence of twelve principal crafts or trades: “And each trade of these twelve has twelve thousand stations, that is to say, twelve thousand houses for each.” Each house contained “at least ten men to exercise those arts, and some fifteen, and some twenty, and thirty, and some forty.” Taken together, the men’s commercial activities generated a staggering amount of wealth, more than Marco expected any European to credit. “There are so many merchants, and so rich, who do so much, and so great trade, that there is not a man who could say or tell the truth about them that should be believed, they are so extraordinary a thing.” Generating unimaginable wealth, these princes of commerce did not work “with their hands,” but all lived “as delicately and cleanly as they were kings and barons.” And the women of Quinsai were equally refined, “very delicate and angelic things,” in Marco’s estimation. These ethereal creatures were “very delicately reared,” and they dressed “with so many ornaments of silk and of jewels that the value of them could not be estimated.” He was awed by the inhabitants’ splendid homes, “very well built and richly worked.” He breathlessly reports, “They take such great delight in ornaments, paintings, and buildings, that the sums they spend on them are a stupendous thing.”
In describing the inhabitants, Marco gropes for superlatives: “The native inhabitants of the city of Quinsai are peaceful people through having been brought up and habituated by their kings, who were of the same nature. They do not handle arms nor keep them at home. Quarrels or any differences are never heard or noticed among them. They do their merchandise and arts with great sincerity and truth. They love one another so that a district may be reckoned as one family on account of the friendliness that exists between the men and the women by reason of the neighborhood. So great is the familiarity that it exists between them without any jealousy or suspicion of their women, for whom they have the greatest respect; and one who should dare to speak improper words to any married woman would be thought a great villain. They are equally friendly with the foreigners who come to them for the sake of trade, and gladly receive them at home, saluting them, and give them every help and advice in the business they do.”
NO MATTER HOW festive Quinsai seemed, it was a city under military occupation. The inhabitants, Marco says, “do not like to see soldiers, nor those of the Khan
’s guards, as it seems to them that by reason of them they have been deprived of their natural kings and lords.”
Despite his allegiance to Kublai Khan, Marco came to consider the Mongol presence in Quinsai a stain upon the fine silken fabric of Chinese society. No less than sixty thousand Mongol guards were billeted throughout the city, ostensibly to protect its wooden houses from the ravages of fire; in reality, they formed an army of occupation. “After the Great Khan took the city,” Marco relates, “it was ordered that on each of the twelve thousand bridges ten men are on guard night and day, under a covering, that is, five by night and five by day. And these [men] are to guard the city that none should do evil things, and that none should dare think of treason, nor make his city rebel against him.”
The khan’s zealous sentries “never sleep, but always stay on watch.” Each of their huts contained a “tabernacle with a large basin and a clock,” by which they marked the passing of the hours with military precision. Some guards patrolled the city streets, not to preserve safety but to spot minor infractions and make life miserable for those responsible. Should anyone “keep a light lit or fire after the hours allowed,” he would be severely punished. The guards’ presence was sufficiently intimidating to keep everyone indoors, even when self-preservation dictated otherwise. Should a fire break out, “no dweller in the city would have the courage to come out of the house at nighttime nor to go to the fire, but only those to whom the goods belong go there and these guards who go to help, and they are never less than one or two thousand.”
Any fire, no matter how insignificant, imperiled everyone in the city built of wood. “It would run the risk of burning half the city,” Marco reports. In response, the guards maintained a sophisticated alarm system. On a nearby hill stood “a timber tower commanding the whole city,” and on that tower was hung “a great wooden board, which a man holds and strikes with a mallet to signal in case of fire.” In practice, the guards on the watchtower sounded the alarm at any hint of “tumult or uproar” reaching their ears from the city below.
Marco’s precise observations about the danger of fire in daily life find confirmation in records showing that nearly every year brought a fire emergency. During the thirteenth century, the city suffered especially devastating losses in 1208, 1229, 1237 (thirty thousand homes burned in this conflagration), and finally 1275, on the eve of the Mongol occupancy. Perhaps the most severe loss occurred on April 15, 1208, when a fire broke out in the district occupied by the government. Over the course of the next four days more than 58,000 houses burned across an area of three square miles, causing countless fatalities. In the succeeding months, the government billeted more than five thousand people left homeless in various Buddhist and Taoist monasteries, and even in boats floating on West Lake. No wonder Quinsai took few precautions against invaders from distant lands, such as the Mongols, when fires close to home proved a much deadlier menace.
Merchants stored their wares in fireproof buildings. Owned by wealthy families and the local nobility, the warehouses occupied lots surrounded by sinuous water channels, which protected them from flames and robbers alike. The owners rented them out by the month, charging hefty fees but including a night watchman in the bargain. Despite these precautions, city dwellers lived in constant fear of sudden infernos, and the tiniest show of sparks, a fast-spreading rumor, or a sound, however soft, resembling the alarm on the watchtower could set off a panic. And if a fire did break out, looting posed an additional hazard. When caught, the “fire followers,” as the looters were known, faced swift and sure justice under martial law.
In the same spirit of protection and oppression, the Mongol guards detained anyone who ventured abroad late at night. They dispatched the poor and crippled to public shelters and hospitals, but if the object of their scrutiny was healthy, they compelled him “to do some work.”
THE MONGOLS insinuated themselves into Quinsai, as they did with other prize cities they had conquered, by replacing Chinese notes with their own paper money. Marco observed Mongol notes being minted. “One takes the innermost bark of the mulberry tree and lays it together and makes of it the same as one does with us, paper of which one makes sheets, as one does our paper,” he reports. “The sheets one tears after the shape of a penny on which one prints the stamp and mark of the Great Khan. The money is taken for everything that will buy and sell.”
Next, the Mongols constructed their own style of roadway through the heart of the city. “Because the couriers of the Great Khan could not travel quickly with horses over paved streets,” Marco explains, “a part of the street at the side is left without pavement for the sake of the couriers.” The couriers mingled with the city’s ordinary traffic, which consisted of “long carriages covered and furnished with hangings and cushions of silk, in which six people can sit.”
Even in occupied Quinsai, life continued as before. Military skills and technology mattered less than commerce, literature, drama, poetry, painting, crafts, or charitable pursuits. Here the Mongols, their lust for conquest for its own sake apparent to all, confronted a superior civilization, and their response was paradoxical yet predictable: they emulated those whom they conquered, hoping to rise to the level of their subjects. The result was the most civilized and elegant of war zones.
MARCO SAMPLED the temptations offered by the numerous “boats and barges” skimming across the surface of West Lake, “for enjoyment and to give one’s self pleasure; and in these there can stay ten, fifteen, and twenty, and more persons, because they are fifteen to twenty paces long with broad and flat bottoms, so that they sail without rocking on either side.”
The exquisite West Lake vista resulted from centuries of careful maintenance. Nine miles in circumference, and only nine feet deep, the lake served as the focal point for the city, the quintessential Chinese landscape, and the inspiration for countless works of art. It symbolized the soul of China, and was guarded like the national treasure that it was. Military patrols, unmentioned by Marco but noted in other sources, conducted constant surveillance of West Lake to maintain tranquility and hygiene, lest it become fouled with spoiled food and waste. It was strictly forbidden to deposit refuse in the lake, or even to attempt to cultivate common plants such as the lotus or water chestnut. As Marco, or any other pleasure seeker, floated out on the water of West Lake, the crowded city receded, and the surrounding mountains loomed ever larger, while the eye was constantly drawn to the striking pagoda erected on Thunder Point three hundred years before Marco’s arrival. This soaring octagonal tower, 170 feet high, seemed to connect Heaven and earth.
The idyllic setting served as the perfect backdrop for the women of Quinsai. “Every one who likes to enjoy himself with women or with his companions takes one of the boats,” Marco notes. And the boats are “always kept adorned with beautiful seats and tables and with all the other furniture necessary for making a feast.” In his description, they resemble the elegant gondolas plying the canals of Venice, only grander, and more luxurious. “Above, they are covered and flat, where men stand with poles that they stick into the ground (for the lake is not more than two paces deep) and guide the barges where they are ordered. The covering on the inside part is painted with different colors and patterns, and likewise all the barge; and there are windows round about that they can open and shut, so that those who stay seated…may be able to look this way and that and delight the eyes with the variety and beauty of the places to which they are taken.” The result is refined euphoria, “for their mind and care is set on nothing else but bodily pleasure and enjoyment in feasting together.”
The concept of recreation for the masses was as new to Marco as it would have been to his readers, and he portrays an entire city in the thrall of pleasure: “Barges like these are found on the lake at all times with people who go for enjoyment; for the inhabitants of this city never think of anything else after they have done their work or business but to spend part of the day with their ladies, or with courtesans.”
MARCO HINTS th
at the women of Quinsai—courtesans and others—were bolder and more sensually aware than their Western counterparts. True enough: by Western standards, Quinsai fostered an outré culture in which sexual behavior often centered on female pleasure. It was believed that whenever a couple had intercourse, the woman should, if possible, experience orgasm; the man, however, was encouraged to reach orgasm only on special occasions, the better to preserve his vital essence—his semen. In addition, male masturbation was strongly censured as a waste of semen, but female masturbation was subtly encouraged. Sex toys designed to aid women in reaching orgasm were common in Quinsai and were widely discussed and written about in popular sex manuals, usually in the form of spurious dialogues involving historical figures.
“The Biography of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty” was over a thousand years old by the time of Marco’s arrival in Quinsai, but it was still quoted in more recent sex primers. One passage addresses the timeless issue of male potency, and offers a commonsensical solution.
The Yellow Emperor said, “Sometimes it happens that in the exercise of coitus, my Jade Stalk does not want to rise. When that happens, I turn red from the shame of humiliation, and my brow becomes moist with sweat. However, as I burn with blazing desire, I shake my member with my hand, so that it might rise. Please instruct me as to what to do on such an occasion.” The Plain Girl said: “What Your Majesty inquires about is a common suffering of all people. This is [because they forget] that every time a man wishes to copulate, there is a certain order of things that must be followed. In the first place, the man must harmonize his mood with that of the woman, and then the Jade Stalk will rise.”
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