Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [97]
Marco often demonstrated that he was no prude, but sex Tibetan style offended his sensibilities. Seeking the moral high ground, he reminds his European audience, and himself, that these people were “idolaters and extremely treacherous and cruel and wicked, for they hold it no sin to rob and to do evil, and I believe they are the greatest scoundrels and the greatest thieves in the world.”
Nevertheless, their women were very eager in bed.
THE WOMEN of the adjacent province, Gaindu, appeared even more bizarre to Marco than did the daughters of Tibet. The men, Marco relates, did not “regard it as villainy if a foreigner or other man shames him at pleasure with his wife or with his daughter or with his sister or with any woman whom he may have in his house.” More astonishing, he “regards it as a great good when [a foreigner] lies with them.” Indeed, the man of the house “strictly commands” his wives and daughters to make themselves available to travelers such as Marco, and removes himself “to his field or to his vines and does not come back there so long as the stranger stays in his house. And I tell you that many times [the foreigner] stays there three days or four, eight and sometimes ten, and lies in bed enjoying himself with the wife of that wretch or his daughter or sister or whoever he shall wish.” All the while, he hangs his hat in the window or displays it in the courtyard as a sign that he is inside. “And the cuckold wretch, so long as he sees that token at his house, does not dare go back at all, knowing that the stranger is there, lest he should hinder him in his pleasures.” More surprising still, after the visitor departs, the master of the house returns to find “his family all joyful and happy, and rejoices with them, making them tell all the entertainment they made for the stranger, and all with joy give thanks to the gods.”
Although he enjoyed titillating his audience with this lurid description, Marco denounced the practice as a “vile custom” outlawed by Kublai Khan—not that anyone in this remote region paid much attention to the remote leader’s edicts.
Marco hints that the practice caused him keen embarrassment as he left Gaindu. Families inhabiting the “rugged places of the mountains near the roads” extended their peculiar form of hospitality to itinerant merchants, who repaid their kindness with a bit of fabric “or other thing of little cost.” Marco probably did just that, but ran afoul of his hosts. He relates that when such a merchant mounted his horse to depart, the man of the house and his wife mocked him and shouted curses: “See what you have left to us that you have forgotten!” they cried. “Show us what you have taken of ours!”
And with these words of derision ringing in his ears, the unsettled foreigner galloped away.
MARCO PAUSED just long enough to take note of an eye-catching bush that he took to be a clove. Not knowing quite what to make of it, he diligently reports that it “has twigs and leaves like a laurel in manner…. The flower it makes is white and small as in the clove, when it is ripe it is dusky black.” M. G. Pauthier, the nineteenth-century French scholar and editor, concluded that Marco meant Assam, or black tea—an especially interesting observation because it had long been assumed that the Venetian, despite all his years in China, never mentioned tea. Other commentators retorted that Marco was actually talking about the aromatic cassia tree, whose bark provides cinnamon. That is a less likely explanation because almost in the same breath Marco mentions cinnamon, implying that it was quite different from this particular flower.
Most likely, Marco was describing tea without realizing what it was. Unlike the Chinese, the Mongols drank koumiss and rarely sipped tea. No wonder Marco was unfamiliar with it.
JUDGING FROM HIS familiarity with Mongol commerce, Marco probably served as a tax collector for Kublai Khan, and most likely he collected revenues from salt, a vital commodity in