Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [115]
BY EUROPEAN STANDARDS, Quinsai’s varied population was as incredible as its size. Marco tells of a profusion of people and goods that would have amazed those accustomed to life on a more intimate scale: “Three days a week, there is a concourse of from forty to fifty thousand persons who come to market and bring everything you can desire for food, because there is always a great supply of victuals; of game, that is to say, of roebuck, red-deer, fallow-deer, hare, rabbit, and of birds, partridges, pheasant, francolin, quail, fowl, capon, and more ducks and geese than can be told; for they rear so many of them in [West] Lake that for one Venetian groat”—a thick silver coin of modest value, whose name derived from the Italian grosso, or large—“may be had a pair of geese and two pair of ducks.”
As Marco wandered past the market stalls, rubbing shoulders with enough shoppers to populate several European cities, he marveled at the profusion of goods on display, the likes of which he had never seen in the West—“all sorts of vegetables and fruits, and above all the rest immense pears, which weigh ten pounds apiece, which are white inside like a paste, and very fragrant; peaches in their seasons, yellow and white, very delicate.”
The abundance of fresh produce available was exceeded only by the quantity of fish. Each day, Marco reports, it arrived fresh from the “Ocean Sea up the river for the space of twenty-five miles,” all of it supplemented by equally succulent fish from West Lake, although this was not as desirable, “because of the impurities that come from the city” polluting the lake water. “Whoever saw this quantity of fish would never think that it could be sold, and yet in a few hours it has all been taken away, so great is the multitude of the inhabitants who are used to live delicacies; for they eat both fish and flesh at the same meal.”
DESPITE MARCO’S tendency to embellish, the City of Heaven was emphatically real. Contemporaneous accounts by outsiders who managed to reach Quinsai all emphasized the city’s overwhelming size, prosperity, and beauty, and acclaimed Quinsai the greatest in all the world.
The Persian historian Vassaf, writing about Quinsai in 1300, described very much the same city Marco experienced and loved—its great size, broad streets, and abundance.
Quinsai, which is the principal city of the country of Matchin and which seems a paradise of which the sky forms the ground, extends in length so that its circumference is approximately twenty-four parasangs [about fifteen kilometers]. Its pavement is made of baked bricks and stones; it contains many houses and buildings built in wood and decorated with beautiful paintings of all kinds. From one end of the city to the other three post stations have been established. The largest of the streets is, it is said, three parasangs in length, and contains sixty pavilions of a uniform architecture, sustained by pillars of the same proportions. The revenue from the tax on salt amounts daily to 700 balichs of tchao [paper money]. The number of people who exercise different professions is truly prodigious: it has been calculated that there are thirty-two thousand cloth dyers; one can judge from that about the other kinds of industry. Seven hundred thousand soldiers and an equal number of inhabitants are recorded in the offices of numbering and on the registers of the chancellorship. In addition, the city contains seven hundred temples which resemble fortresses, each inhabited by a number of priests without faith, monks without religion, as well as by a multitude of workers, guards, servants, idolaters with their families and people of their suites. All these men are not mentioned in the census,