Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [69]
Marco tried to educate his skeptical European audience and persuade himself about the practicality and efficiency of Kublai Khan’s paper money. He writes: “All the people and regions of men who are under his rule gladly take these sheets in payment, because wherever they go they make all their payments with them both for goods and for pearls and for precious stones and for gold and for silver; they can buy everything with them, and they make payment with the sheets of which I have told you.” Equally impressive, the sheets of paper money “are so light that the sheet worth ten bezants of gold weighs not one.”
IN HIS PASSION to reform, Kublai Khan welcomed craftsmen, artisans, traders, and merchants to his court, in a sharp break with Chinese practice. Muslims from the Middle East brought spices, camels, and carpets with them. Merchants brought luxurious silk and lacquer, not to mention rhinoceros horns, and incense, much of it designed to appeal to Muslim tastes.
Kublai Khan’s treasury profited tremendously from this commercial activity. The Mongol government lent money at extremely low rates to the Mongol nobility while levying taxes on traders. No matter what type of transaction was involved, Kublai Khan’s administration required that merchants exchange their own currency, usually in the form of valuable coins, and occasionally gems, into Mongol paper currency, as Marco Polo observes: “Many times a year the merchants come together with pearls and with precious stones and with gold and with silver and with other things, cloth of gold and of silk; and these merchants give all of these things to the great lord. The great lord calls twelve wise men…to look at those things that the merchants have brought and to have them paid with what it seems to them they are worth…with those sheets of which I have told you.” If, perchance, “one has kept these sheets so long that they are torn and are spoilt, then he takes them to the mint and they are changed for new and clean ones.”
Although Marco found it difficult to believe that paper currency could have real value, he saw—with his own eyes, as he was fond of saying—that it served as the basis of a flexible and practical economic system, and extended the Mongol Empire’s economic influence over great distances. Paper money seemed to Marco a more potent invention than rockets or giant slingshots, and more persuasive than religion. It could even be considered Kublai Khan’s hidden weapon of conquest.
THROUGHOUT HIS REIGN, Kublai benefited from a unique asset: Chabi, his principal wife, who yearned to become the empress of a unified Mongol realm, and who devoted her energies to sustaining her husband when he became ensnared by infighting among the Mongols. It was Chabi who summoned Kublai Khan from his battles with the Song dynasty to defend his throne. And it was she who insisted that Liu Ping-chung persuade Kublai Khan to abandon a plan to turn the Chinese agricultural land surrounding the capital city into pastures for Mongol horses. “You Chinese are intelligent,” she told Liu Ping-chung. “When you speak, the emperor listens. Why have you not remonstrated with him?” Once the adviser interceded, Kublai Khan changed his mind, and left the Chinese farmland intact.
In court, where appearances mattered, Chabi set the fashion. Known for frugality, she collected discarded animal pelts and string, and other women soon followed her example. She took it upon herself to redesign the traditional Mongol headpiece, adding a visor to afford protection from the strong sun in China. She even devised a sleeveless tunic for combat.
Beyond her practical concerns, she shared with her husband a fascination with the Chinese emperor Taizong, who