Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [91]
Draped along the shores of West Lake, Hangzhou presented the archetypal Chinese landscape of mountains soaring above a tranquil body of water that seemed to reflect Heaven itself. The metropolis was the traditional seat of the Song dynasty, and it had just been conquered by Kublai Khan’s leading general, Bayan, at the time Marco was dispatched to help administer the khan’s affairs. As a disinterested European, Marco was just the sort of official whom Kublai Khan preferred for overseeing the finances of a hostile or suspicious populace. Everything that Marco had seen since leaving Venice, even the wonders of Cambulac and the great Kublai Khan himself, served as a prologue to his voyage into the heart of China.
THE TWO CITIES were connected by one of the most massive public works in all of China, the Grand Canal, stretching over a thousand miles from Cambulac south to Hangzhou. The waterway served as a principal artery for Chinese (and Mongol) shipping and commerce. Its construction had been under way, in fits and starts, for centuries, but by the time of Marco’s trip it was nearing completion. Although Marco does not supply a precise itinerary, he probably followed the Grand Canal for much of his journey to Hangzhou.
Leaving Cambulac, Marco encountered “a very beautiful stone bridge” that crossed a wide, swiftly flowing river, which led to the Ocean Sea. He estimated the bridge to be “three hundred paces long and eight paces wide,” room enough for ten horsemen to ride abreast, clattering on the polished stone. “And it has twenty-four arches and twenty-four piers in the water supporting them,” he says, “and it is all of gray marble and very well worked and well-founded.” The bridge opened onto a vista as spacious as China itself. An impressionable young man could easily persuade himself that the world lay at his feet, and in a sense it did. The bridge, as much a spiritual symbol as an architectural wonder, evoked crossing over into a new realm, a new consciousness, even a new life. As he set foot on it, Marco may have sensed himself growing and changing with every step, as he passed beyond the Mongol stronghold into China itself.
Crossing the monumental bridge, he considered the care and ingenuity that had gone into its construction. “From one pillar to the other,” he observes, “it is closed in with a flag of gray marble all worked with different sculptures and mortised into the columns at the side, through the length of the bridge to the end, so that people who cross may not be able to fall into the water.” In all, he counted six hundred of these elegant pillars, each topped with a lion or similar animal, fashioned “of very fine marble.”
Known today as the Marco Polo Bridge, this structure is essentially the same as the day Marco traversed it. Completed in 1192, it is also called the Guangli Bridge, and its stone span reaches across the banks of the Lugou River. Historical records indicate that the Lugou was “violent and flowed extraordinarily rapidly,” but modern construction has diminished the current. The bridge witnessed one of the major engagements of the Second World War, when Japanese forces approached it during their campaign to conquer China.
THIRTY MILES from the bridge that would one day bear his name, Marco wandered through a charming landscape dotted with attractive, welcoming villages, seductive shade trees, “very fruitful cultivated fields,” refreshing springs, and Buddhist monasteries, where the monks busied themselves weaving silk and fashioning gold jewelry. In a change from his rugged, hazardous journey to Cambulac four years earlier, Marco seems to have felt secure, and he received a courteous reception wherever he went. “There are very many fine inns or hostels in our manner,” he notes with satisfaction, “where the wayfarers lodge, because of the multitude of merchants and strangers who come there.”
Thereafter, Marco’s account, likely drawn from the notes he brought back to Italy from