Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [118]
NO MATTER HOW festive Quinsai seemed, it was a city under military occupation. The inhabitants, Marco says, “do not like to see soldiers, nor those of the Khan’s guards, as it seems to them that by reason of them they have been deprived of their natural kings and lords.”
Despite his allegiance to Kublai Khan, Marco came to consider the Mongol presence in Quinsai a stain upon the fine silken fabric of Chinese society. No less than sixty thousand Mongol guards were billeted throughout the city, ostensibly to protect its wooden houses from the ravages of fire; in reality, they formed an army of occupation. “After the Great Khan took the city,” Marco relates, “it was ordered that on each of the twelve thousand bridges ten men are on guard night and day, under a covering, that is, five by night and five by day. And these [men] are to guard the city that none should do evil things, and that none should dare think of treason, nor make his city rebel against him.”
The khan’s zealous sentries “never sleep, but always stay on watch.” Each of their huts contained a “tabernacle with a large basin and a clock,” by which they marked the passing of the hours with military precision. Some guards patrolled the city streets, not to preserve safety but to spot minor infractions and make life miserable for those responsible. Should anyone “keep a light lit or fire after the hours allowed,” he would be severely punished. The guards’ presence was sufficiently intimidating to keep everyone indoors, even when self-preservation dictated otherwise. Should a fire break out, “no dweller in the city would have the courage to come out of the house at nighttime nor to go to the fire, but only those to whom the goods belong go there and these guards who go to help, and they are never less than one or two thousand.”
Any fire, no matter how insignificant, imperiled everyone in the city built of wood. “It would run the risk of burning half the city,” Marco reports. In response, the guards maintained a sophisticated alarm system. On a nearby hill stood “a timber tower commanding the whole city,” and on that tower was hung “a great wooden board, which a man holds and strikes with a mallet to signal in case of fire.” In practice, the guards on the watchtower sounded the alarm at any hint of “tumult or uproar” reaching their ears from the city below.
Marco’s precise observations about the danger of fire in daily life find confirmation in records showing that nearly every year brought a fire emergency. During the thirteenth century, the city suffered especially devastating losses in 1208, 1229, 1237 (thirty thousand homes burned in this conflagration), and finally 1275, on the eve of the Mongol occupancy. Perhaps the most severe loss occurred on April 15, 1208, when a fire broke out in the district occupied by the government. Over the course of the next four days more than 58,000 houses burned across an area of three square miles, causing countless fatalities. In the succeeding months, the government billeted more than five thousand people left homeless in various Buddhist and Taoist monasteries, and even in boats floating on West Lake. No wonder Quinsai took few precautions against invaders from distant lands, such as the Mongols, when fires close to home proved a much deadlier menace.
Merchants stored their wares in fireproof buildings. Owned by wealthy families and the local nobility, the warehouses occupied lots surrounded by sinuous water channels, which protected them from flames and robbers alike. The owners rented them out by the month, charging hefty fees but including a night watchman in the bargain. Despite these precautions, city dwellers lived in constant fear of sudden