welve gates," where merchants and strangers lived, each nation with
separate "burses" or store-houses, where they lodged. From this centre
to the land of Gog and Magog and the champaign-land of Bargu, the Great
Khan travelled every year in midsummer for the fresh air of the plateau
country of central Asia, as well as for a better view of the great
Russian and Bactrian sub-kingdoms of his House. The six months of spring
and autumn were spent in slow progresses through central and southern
China to Thibet on one side, and to Tonquin on the other. But greater
even than Pekin, Quinsai, or Kansay, the City of Heaven, in southern
China, though no longer the capital even of a separate Kingdom of Mangi,
was the crowning work of Chinese civilisation. It surpassed the other
cities of Kublai, as much as these overshadowed the Rome or Venice of
the thirteenth century.

"In the world there is not its like, for by common report it is one
hundred miles in circuit, with a lake on one side and a river on the
other, divided in many channels and upon these and the canals adjoining
twelve thousand bridges of stone; there are ten market places, each half
a mile square; great store-houses of stone, where the Indian merchants
lay by their goods; palaces and gardens on both sides of the main
street, which, like all the highways in Mangi, is paved with stone on
each side, and in the midst full of gravel, with passages for the water,
which keeps it always clean." Salt, silk, fruit, precious stones, and
cloth of gold are the chief commodities; the paper money of the Great
Khan is used everywhere; all the people, except a few Nestorians and
Moslems, are "idolaters, so luxurious and so happy that a man would
think himself in Paradise."

It was only in recent years that Kublai, or his general, Baian, had
captured Quinsai and driven out the King of Mangi with his seraglio and
his friends. The exile till then had only thought of pleasure, of wine,
women, and song, the "sweet meat which cost him the sour sauce ye have
heard," on the approach of danger, had fled on board the ships he had
prepared to "certain impregnable isles in the ocean," and if these
impregnable islands may be identified with Zipangu or Japan, the
conquerors pursued him even here. There is nothing more interesting in
Polo's book than his story of the Mongol failure in the Eastern islands,
fifteen hundred miles from the coast of Mangi, now first discovered to
Christian knowledge.