Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [117]
He has a large lacquer bowl in front of him in which swim turtles, turbots, and other fish. He beats time on a small bronze gong and calls up one of the creatures by name. It comes immediately and dances on the surface, wearing a kind of little hat on its head…. There is also an archery expert who sets up in front of the spectators a big wheel a yard and a half in diameter, with all sorts of objects, flowers, birds, and people painted on it. He announces that he is going to hit this or that object, and having started spinning it rapidly, he shoots his arrows through the midst of the spectators. He hits the exact spot he has declared he will hit. He can even score a hit on the most precisely defined spots of the spinning target, such as a particular feather in a particular wing of a bird.
The memoirist wandered in a daze among snake charmers blowing on little pipes, luring their hideous charges from the bamboo baskets where they coiled in darkness; and a Taoist monk who carried a trap filled with multicolored shellfish, which he claimed he had hypnotized. Boxers abounded, as did chess players, poets, writers of light verse, acrobats, and magicians. A Chinese record of the era lists five hundred and fifty-four performers who appeared at court, grouped into fifty-five categories, including kite flyers and ball players, magicians and singers, impressionists, archers, and bawdy raconteurs.
THE GREAT rectangular palaces looming over this frenzied activity caused Marco to tilt his head upward, to take in their lush gardens, “and nearby them, houses of artisans who work in their shops.” He writes that “at all hours are met people who are going up and down on their business, so that to see a great crowd anyone would believe that it would not be possible that victuals are found enough to be able to feed it; and yet every market day all the squares are covered and filled with people and merchants who bring them both on carts and on boats, and all is disposed of.”
He sensed the order underlying this apparent chaos, the existence of twelve principal crafts or trades: “And each trade of these twelve has twelve thousand stations, that is to say, twelve thousand houses for each.” Each house contained “at least ten men to exercise those arts, and some fifteen, and some twenty, and thirty, and some forty.” Taken together, the men’s commercial activities generated a staggering amount of wealth, more than Marco expected any European to credit. “There are so many merchants, and so rich, who do so much, and so great trade, that there is not a man who could say or tell the truth about them that should be believed, they are so extraordinary a thing.” Generating unimaginable wealth, these princes of commerce did not work “with their hands,” but all lived “as delicately and cleanly as they were kings and barons.” And the women of Quinsai were equally refined, “very delicate and angelic things,” in Marco’s estimation. These ethereal creatures were “very delicately reared,” and they dressed “with so many ornaments of silk and of jewels that the value of them could not be estimated.” He was awed by the inhabitants’ splendid homes, “very well built and richly worked.” He breathlessly reports, “They take such great delight in ornaments, paintings, and buildings, that the sums they spend on them are a stupendous thing.”
In describing the inhabitants, Marco gropes for superlatives: “The native inhabitants of the city of Quinsai are peaceful people through having been brought up and habituated by their kings, who were of the same nature. They do not handle arms nor keep them at home. Quarrels or any differences are never heard or noticed among them. They do their merchandise and arts with great sincerity and truth. They love one another so that a district may be reckoned as one family on account of the friendliness that exists between the men and the women by reason of the neighborhood. So great is the familiarity that it exists between them without