Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [80]
The honored guests drank from “lacquered bowls” large enough to accommodate the thirst of eight or ten, using golden ladles. Once again Marco leaps ahead of his readers: lacquer was another technology raised to a high level of refinement in Asia, yet it was unknown in the West. Lacquer is, essentially, a sophisticated varnish made from resin extruded by an Asian sumac, Rhus verniciflua, known in China as the varnish tree. When the resin, similar to that of poison ivy, is layered as a thin film, it hardens into a tough skin, but only in the dark; exposed to sunlight, it remains tacky. Although Marco does not appear familiar with how lacquer was produced, he takes care to explain the vessel for Europeans unfamiliar with it: “The ladles are made like a gold cup with a foot and a golden handle, and with that cup they take wine from that great golden lacquer bowl and are able to drink.” He says that there were so many of these “golden bowls” and “other things of great value” that “all those who see them are dumbfounded.”
These exotic feasting customs could be confusing to the many “foreigners” who were guests at the court, so Kublai Khan obligingly assigned several of his barons the task of acquainting visitors with Mongol ways. “These barons go continually here and there through the hall asking those who sit at table if they want anything, and if any there wish for wine, milk, or meat, or anything else, they have it brought to them immediately by the servants.”
Stranger still, those who served the khan food and drink had “their mouths and their noses wrapped in beautiful veils or napkins of silk and of gold, so that neither their breath nor their smell should come into the food and the drink of the great lord.” Musicians, “of which there [were] a vast quantity,” awaited the moment when the khan brought food to his lips, and then they began to perform. At that point, a boy presented a cup of wine to the khan, then walked backward three paces and knelt, whereupon “all the barons and all the other people who are there kneel down and make a sign of great humility; and then the great lord drinks.” Even after all this ritual, feasting commenced only when the knights and barons in attendance brought food to their first wives.
The entertainment offerings were hypnotic. Dressed in iridescent attire, musicians played bewitching melodies on stringed instruments, lulling everyone present into a state of pleasant stupefaction. Mongolian music, so repetitive and insistent, was haunting and beguiling; it numbed the mind even as it awakened the soul with intensely pleasurable, even sexual sounds. The musicians were followed by highly theatrical, spectacularly costumed troupes of jugglers and acrobats, who in turn gave way to itinerant actors reciting poetry and soothsayers spouting whatever they pleased. “And all make great enjoyment and great festivity before the great lord,” Marco comments, “and make much joy of it and laugh at it and enjoy it much.”
MARCO REMINDED his audience that even in the midst of revelry, the Mongol barons observed a strict code of behavior. For example, two “great men like giants,” each holding a rod in his hands, guarded every door to the feasting hall. The forbidding sight reminded everyone present that “no one is allowed to touch the threshold of the door, but he must stretch his foot beyond. And if by accident he touches it”—a mere accident—“the guards take away all his clothes, and then again he must redeem them; and if they do not take his clothes, they give him as many blows as are appointed him.” At least foreigners received a warning about this rule from the barons, who explained that touching the threshold was considered an ill omen. But the Mongols were realistic as well as superstitious; if any man became too drunk during the feasting to cross the threshold as he left the hall without tripping all over it, he was excused.