engineers to the
Mongol Court; Marco was even made in 1277 a commissioner of the Imperial
Council, and soon after sent upon government missions to Yunnan in
extreme south-west China and to Yangchow city.

The greater part of Marco's own memoirs is taken up with his account of
the thirty-four provinces of the Tartar Empire that centred round the
"six parts of Cathay and the nine parts of Mangi," the districts of
northern and southern China as we know them,--an account of the roads,
rivers, and towns, the trade, the Court and the Imperial Ports, the
customs and manner of life among the subject peoples in that Empire,
perhaps the largest ever known. Especially do the travellers dwell on
the public roads from Pekin or Cambaluc through all the provinces, the
ten thousand Royal inns upon the highways, the two hundred thousand
horses kept for the public service, the wonderful speed of transit in
the Great Khan's embassages, "so that they could go from Pekin to the
wall of China in two days."

But scarcely less is said about the great rivers--the arteries of
Chinese commerce, even more than the caravan routes,--above all, the
Yang-Tse-Kiang, "the greatest stream in the world, like an arm of the
sea, flowing above one hundred days' journey from its source into the
ocean, and into which flow countless others, making it so great that
incredible quantities of merchandise are brought by this river. It
flows," exclaims Marco, "through sixteen provinces, past the quays of
two hundred cities, at one of which I saw at one time five thousand
vessels, and there are other marts that have more."

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 t