We may now say without hesitation that by this road Marco travelled. His _Tibet_ commences with the mountain region near Ya-chau; his 20 days’ journey through a devastated and dispeopled tract is the journey to Ning-yuan fu. Even now, from Ts’ing-k’i onwards for several days, not a single inhabited place is seen. The official route from Ya-chau to Ning-yuan lays down 13 stages, but it generally takes from 15 to 18 days. Polo, whose journeys seem often to have been shorter than the modern average,[2] took 20. On descending from the highlands he comes once more into a populated region, and enters the charming Valley of Kien-ch’ang. This valley, with its capital near the upper extremity, its numerous towns and villages, its cassia, its spiced wine, and its termination southward on the River of the Golden Sands, is CAINDU. The traveller’s road from Ningyuan to Yunnanfu probably lay through Hwei-li, and the Kin-sha Kiang would be crossed as already indicated, near its most southerly bend, and almost due north of Yun-nan fu. (See _Richthofen_ as quoted at pp. 45–46.) As regards the _name_ of CAINDU or GHEINDU (as in G. T.), I think we may safely recognise in the last syllable the _do_ which is so frequent a termination of Tibetan names (Amdo, Tsiamdo, etc.); whilst the _Cain_, as Baron Richthofen has pointed out, probably survives in the first part of the name _Kien_chang. [Baber writes (pp. 80–81): “Colonel Yule sees in the word _Caindu_ a variation of ‘Chien-ch’ang,’ and supposes the syllable ‘du’ to be the same as the termination ‘du,’ ‘do,’ or ‘tu,’ so frequent in Tibetan names. In such names, however, ‘do’ never means a district, but always a confluence, or a town near a confluence, as might almost be guessed from a map of Tibet.... Unsatisfied with Colonel Yule’s identification, I cast about for another, and thought for a while that a clue had been found in the term ‘Chien-t’ou’ (sharp-head), applied to certain Lolo tribes. But the idea had to be abandoned, since Marco Polo’s anecdote about the ‘caitiff,’ and the loose manners of his family, could never have referred to the Lolos, who are admitted even by their Chinese enemies to possess a very strict code indeed of domestic regulations. The Lolos being eliminated, the Si-fans remained; and before we had been many days in their neighbourhood, stories were told us of their conduct which a polite pen refuses to record. It is enough to say that Marco’s account falls rather short of the truth, and most obviously applies to the Si-fan.”