The banquets also given by the great Khan excelled any European feasts. They were attended by many thousands of guests, and their host, raised on a dais, had as his servants the chief nobles, who would wind rich towels round their mouths that they might not breathe upon the royal plates. For presents the Khan was accustomed to receive at a time some five thousand camels, or an equal number of elephants, draped in silken cloths worked with silver and gold. His government surpassed in its organization anything Europe had imagined since the fall of the Roman Empire, such, for instance, as the postal system, by means of messengers on foot and horse, that linked up Pekin with lands a hundred days distant, or the beneficent regard of a ruler who in times of bad harvests not only remitted taxation but dispatched grain to the principal districts that had suffered. Coal was used in China freely, ‘a kind of black stone cut from the mountains in veins,’ as Marco Polo describes it. ‘It maintains the fire’, he added, ‘better than wood, and throughout the whole of Cathay this fuel is used.’ Besides dilating on the wealth and prosperity of China, the Venetian had also much to say of Zipangu, or Japan, of Tibet and Bengal, of Ceylon, ‘the finest island in the world,’ and of Java, supposed then to be ‘above three thousand miles wide’. Other travellers were to confirm many of his statements, but none told their tale so simply and realistically as Polo, while not a few, like the English Sir John Mandeville in the fourteenth century, supplied fiction in large doses where it seemed to them that truth might bore their readers. The eagerness with which either fact or fiction was swallowed bears witness, at any rate, first to the extraordinary fascination excited in mediaeval minds by such names as ‘Cathay’ or ‘Zipangu’; and next to the general Western belief in the inexhaustible riches of the East and their determination to secure at least a portion.