These ‘moult belles pourcelainnes,’ Marco Polo tells us, were to be found all over the world. He was probably speaking, as we have said, of a celadon ware, though it is possible that he may have seen the pure white translucent porcelain of Tingchou. Our first distinct notice of porcelain out of China is indeed of earlier date. In an Arab manuscript in the _Bibliothèque Nationale_, treating of the life and exploits of Saladin, we are told that in the year 1171 that great Emir forwarded from Cairo to his feudal lord Nureddin, Sultan of Damascus, a present of forty pieces of Chinese porcelain, doubtless found among the treasures of the recently conquered Fatimite caliphs of Egypt.[129] We have every reason to believe that this store of porcelain, found in the palace of the heretic caliphs of ‘Babylon,’ can have consisted of nothing else but the much prized ‘martabani,’ of which such wonderful stories are told by the Arab and Persian writers. The high estimation in which this ware was held in Persia at a later date is well brought out in the following quotation from Chardin, who was in Persia in 1672: ‘Everything in the king’s palace is of massive gold or porcelain. There is a kind of green porcelain so precious that one dish alone is worth 500 crowns. They say that this porcelain detects poison by changing colour, but that is a fable.[130] Its price arises from its beauty and the delicacy of its materials, which render it transparent, though above two crowns in thickness.’ Again, in one of the tales of the _Arabian Nights_, we hear of six old slaves who bring in a salad in a huge basin of ‘martabani’ ware. Fragments of porcelain, the fine white paste covered with a greyish green glaze, have been found in the rubbish-heaps both of Fostât or Old Cairo and of Rha (the Rhages of the book of Tobit), near Teheran, and as both these towns were abandoned at least as early as the thirteenth century, a corresponding age has been claimed for the pot-sherds found among the ruins.[131] We now know that a true celadon porcelain was made in Siam, and this ware, there is little doubt, was shipped from the port of Martabani.[132] But in spite of this fact, and of the evidence of the name by which the ware was known, by far the larger part of the porcelain used by the Arabs was probably a true Lung-chuan ware exported from the ports of the Chinese coast, Kinsai, Zaitun, and Canton.