Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [114]
MARCO LAUNCHES INTO a fervid account of Quinsai, a city “so large that in circuit it is…a hundred miles around or thereabouts, because the streets and canals in it are very wide and large.” Proceeding to bring this unknown metropolis to life for his skeptical Western readers, he says, “Then there are squares where they hold market, which on account of the vast multitudes that meet in them are necessarily very large and spacious.”
The more Marco pondered this metropolis, with its canals and bridges and constant waterborne traffic teeming with commerce on a scale that his readers would not have believed possible, the more eloquent his reportage became. “It has on one side,” he continues, “a lake of fresh water [West Lake] that is very clear, and on the other there is an enormous river which, by entering by many great and small canals that run in every part of the city, both takes away all impurities and then enters the lake…. This makes the air very wholesome; and one can go all about the city by land and by these streams. The streets and canals are so great that boats are able to travel there conveniently and carts to carry the things necessary for the inhabitants.”
Marco stumbles when he comes to estimate the number of bridges in the City of Heaven: “There is a story that it has 12,000 bridges, great and small, for the most part of stone, and some are built of wood. And for each of these bridges, or for the most part, a great and large ship could easily pass under the arch of it; and for the others smaller ships could pass. But those that are made over the principal canals and the chief streets are arched so high and with such skill that a boat can pass under them with a mast, and yet there pass over them carriages and horses, so well are the streets inclined to fit the height.” The actual number of bridges in Quinsai came to 347, not 12,000 as Marco states, a discrepancy that would furnish the doubters with ammunition. But as the context makes clear, “12,000 bridges” is not meant to be taken literally. He simply wants to impress upon readers that there were more bridges in Quinsai than he could tally, more, even, than in Venice. “And let no one be surprised if there are so many bridges,” he goes on, “because I tell you that this town is all…lagoons as Venice is, and also all surrounded by water, and so it is needful that there may be so many bridges for this, that people may be able to go through the town both inside and out by land.”
Nor were bridges the only engineering marvel of Quinsai. The city’s enormous moat was “perhaps forty miles long.” Marco relates that it was made “by order of those ancient kings of that province so as to be able to draw off the river into it every time that it rose above the banks; and it serves also as a defense for the city, and the earth that was dug out was put on the inner side, which makes the likeness of a little hill that surrounds it.”
Marco again strained credulity with his description of Quinsai’s sprawl, although it was entirely accurate. “There are ten principal open spaces, besides infinite others for the districts, which are square, that is, half a mile for a side,” he writes. “And along the front street of those there is a main street forty paces wide, which runs straight from one end of the city to the other with many bridges that cross it level and conveniently; and every four miles is found one of those squares such as have two miles (as has been said) of circuit.”
He took note of Quinsai’s celebrated Grand Canal—“a very broad canal that runs parallel to the street at the back of the squares”—without realizing that he was gazing upon the longest artificial waterway in China. The Grand Canal connected major rivers from Quinsai to Cambulac, a distance of a thousand miles. It was an ancient artery, at least a thousand years old by the time Marco visited. Originally a casual