I do not understand why this description is considered very difficult to understand. It depicts a gabled bridge with a flat top, not an uncommon form of bridge in China, I believe. The footway ascends to the beginning of the middle arch, where it becomes flat and level; it continues so for the full width of the arch, and then it descends toward the abutment across the river. With this picture in mind it is easy to decorate the bridge over the Pulisangan, or Hoen-ho, with the accessories described by Marco Polo. The parapets have coping stones of sculptured marble, and pillars are carefully set along the parapets at an equal distance from each other. These pillars are of two sorts. Those above the flat part of the roadway, where the parapets also are horizontal, are tall and massive. On each side, at the brow of the ascent, there is a tall pillar upon the summit of which is a stone lion; and in the middle of each parapet, on this level part of the road, there is a taller and heavier column, whose pedestal is a marble tortoise, and whose summit carries a symbolic lion. Another lion is placed near the tortoise, perhaps on a ledge of stone corbelled out from the parapet. As for the parapets that slope up from the abutments to the point where they become level, or horizontal, they, too, have their emblematic lions carried by pillars, and these ornaments, in accordance with the logic of design, are much smaller than those on the summit of the steep bridge. For the rest, Marco Polo speaks of twenty-four arches and of twenty-five piers; and if we give to the arches an average span of fifty-two feet, and to the piers an average width of thirteen feet, we get a bridge 1573 ft. long, or seventy-three feet longer than the five hundred yards suggested by Colonel Yule. Viewed in this way, apart from the vague glamour of enthusiastic words, there is nothing extravagant in Marco Polo’s description.