NOTE 2.—I confess that the indications in this and the beginning of the following chapter are, to me, full of difficulty. According to the general style of Polo’s itinerary, the 2½ days should be reckoned from Yung-ch’ang; the distance therefore to the capital city of Mien would be 17½ days. The real capital of Mien or Burma at this time was, however, Pagán, in lat. 21° 13′, and that city could hardly have been reached by a land traveller in any such time. We shall see that something may be said in behalf of the supposition that the point reached was _Tagaung_ or _Old Pagán_, on the upper Irawadi, in lat. 23° 28′; and there was perhaps some confusion in the traveller’s mind between this and the great city. The descent might then be from Yung-ch’ang to the valley of the Shwéli, and that valley then followed to the Irawadi. Taking as a scale Polo’s 5 marches from Tali to Yung-ch’ang, I find we should by this route make just about 17 marches from Yung-ch’ang to Tagaung. We have no detailed knowledge of the route, but there _is_ a road that way, and by no other does the plain country approach so near to Yung-ch’ang. (See _Anderson’s Report on Expedition to Western Yunnan_, p. 160.) Dr. Anderson’s remarks on the present question do not in my opinion remove the difficulties. He supposes the long descent to be the descent into the plains of the Irawadi near Bhamo; and from that point the land journey to Great Pagán could, he conceives, “easily be accomplished in 15 days.” I greatly doubt the latter assumption. By the scale I have just referred to it would take at least 20 days. And to calculate the 2½ days with which the journey commences from an indefinite point seems scarcely admissible. Polo is giving us a continuous _itinerary_; it would be ruptured if he left an indefinite distance between his last station and his “long descent.” And if the same principle were applied to the 5 days between Carajan (or Tali) and Vochan (Yung-ch’ang), the result would be nonsense. [Illustration: Temple of Gaudapalén (in the city of Mien), erected _circa_ A.D. 1160.] [_Mien-tien_, to which is devoted ch. vii. of the Chinese work _Sze-i-kwan-k’ao_, appears to have included much more than Burma proper. (See the passage _supra_, pp. 70–71, quoted by Devéria from the _Yuen-shi lei pien_ regarding _Kien-tou_ and _Kin-Chi_.)—H. C.] The hypothesis that I have suggested would suit better with the traveller’s representation of the country traversed as wild and uninhabited. In a journey to Great Pagán the most populous and fertile part of Burma would be passed through.