Asia -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800; Mongols -- History; Polo, Marco, 1254-1323?; Voyages and travels
Now I will quit this and speak of other matters. You must know then
that after going three days out of the six that I told you of you come
to the city of KELINFU, a very great and noble city, belonging to the
Great Kaan. This city hath three stone bridges which are among the
finest and best in the world. They are a mile long and some nine paces
in width, and they are all decorated with rich marble columns. Indeed
they are such fine and marvellous works that to build any one of them
must have cost a treasure.{4}
The people live by trade and manufactures, and have great store of silk
[which they weave into various stuffs], and of ginger and galingale.
{5} [They also make much cotton cloth of dyed thread, which is sent
all over Manzi.] Their women are particularly beautiful. And there
is a strange thing there which I needs must tell you. You must know
they have a kind of fowls which have no feathers, but hair only, like
a cat’s fur.{6} They are black all over; they lay eggs just like our
fowls, and are very good to eat.
In the other three days of the six that I have mentioned above{7}, you
continue to meet with many towns and villages, with traders, and goods
for sale, and craftsmen. The people have much silk, and are Idolaters,
and subject to the Great Kaan. There is plenty of game of all kinds,
and there are great and fierce lions which attack travellers. In the
last of those three days’ journey, when you have gone 15 miles you find
a city called UNKEN, where there is an immense quantity of sugar made.
From this city the Great Kaan gets all the sugar for the use of his
Court, a quantity worth a great amount of money. [And before this city
came under the Great Kaan these people knew not how to make fine sugar;
they only used to boil and skim the juice, which when cold left a black
paste. But after they came under the Great Kaan some men of Babylonia
who happened to be at the Court proceeded to this city and taught the
people to refine the sugar with the ashes of certain trees.{8}]
There is no more to say of the place, so now we shall speak of the
splendour of Fuju. When you have gone 15 miles from the city of Unken,
you come to this noble city which is the capital of the kingdom. So we
will now tell you what we know of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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