Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [210]
T’ao Tsung-i, a scholar and writer of the late Yüan dynasty, wrote about eunuchs in a traditional dialogue between the Yellow Emperor and one of his subjects, known as Ch’i Po, a legendary figure credited with discovering the art of healing the body, as follows. “The Yellow Emperor said: ‘There are men who because of injury to their genitalia have lost their sexual urge, their member will not rise and has become useless. Yet their beard and mustache do not disappear. Why is it that only eunuchs have no beard and mustache? I want to hear the reason for this.’ Ch’i Po replied: ‘In the case of eunuchs their genitalia are amputated, thereby their seminal duct is cut off and they can not emit semen…. Consequently their lips and mouth become arid, and no beardor mustache develop.’ The Yellow Emperor asked: ‘But there are some natural eunuchs who although they have not undergone that mutilation yet do not have beard or mustache. Why is this so?’ Ch’i Po answered: ‘That is because Heaven did not give them a sufficient sexual urge. Hence their seminal duct is not developed, and neither is their genitalia. They have ch’i [essence] but not semen.’”
Examples of Chinese public poetry can be found in Gernet, Daily Life in China, page 237, and the same work describes other customs in the City of Heaven on pages 184, 189–191, and 214–215.
Marco’s “lost Christians” may have belonged to a little-known sect of Armenian Christians, who differed from the Nestorians. The Armenian Christians were monophysites, asserting that Jesus had only one nature, which was divine, and incorporated his human nature. If they were Armenian Christians, they may have been reluctant to reveal their identity, fearing that the Nestorians outnumbered them.
CHAPTER TWELVE / The Divine Wind
In Le Livre de Marco Polo, his edition of Marco Polo’s Travels, Pauthier offers details about the Mongol fleet (pages 540–543). See also Yule and Cordier, volume 2, page 263, note 3.
Marco generated centuries of controversy by giving the date of the treaty of surrender by the Mongols to the Japanese as 1269 (see Polo, The Description of the World, edited by Moule and Pelliott, page 362). This is another miscalculation on the part of Marco, or his translators, who did not accurately convert the Mongol or Chinese lunar calendar date to the Western equivalent. Yule and Cordier correct the date to 1279, but since Kublai Khan attacked Japan repeatedly between 1274 and 1283, it is difficult to know exactly when the treaty, or the siege preceding it, occurred. There is also a question as to whether the story of the thirty thousand castaways occupying the Japanese capital by resorting to disguise was based on fact, or was simply a yarn that Marco found irresistable. Unlike virtually all of the other facts he relates concerning Kublai Khan’s failed siege of Japan, this element finds no corroboration in other sources. Yet Marco’s account is so detailed and plausible, and fits so neatly with what is known of the failed effort, that it is likely based on historical fact, and lost sources, perhaps embellished with Marco’s storytelling flare.
For Morris Rossabi’s useful analysis of the exercise of Mongol power, see his Khubilai Khan, page 212. And for a thorough assessment of the role of Muslims in the Yüan dynasty, see the same author’s “The Muslims in the Early Yüan Dynasty,” in China Under Mongol Rule, edited by J. D. Langlois Jr., pages 256–295. Rossabi writes, “By serving as intermediaries between the Mongol rulers and their Chinese subjects, the Muslims performed valuable services but simultaneously provoked the wrath of the conquerors and the conquered.” He also suggests that “the Mongols, consciously or not, used the Muslims as scapegoats, thereby diverting Chinese animosity from themselves.”
The Ahmad affair occasioned oft-repeated misunderstandings in Marco Polo scholarship. Some accounts speak of a minister named Po-lo who became involved late in the scandal. For example, Yule and Cordier (volume 1, page 442, note 5) write, “It is a pleasant fact that Messer Marco