The Travels of Marco Polo Volume II Part 158

x.x.xVII., p. 191; II., p. 595.

"Keriya, the Pein of Marco Polo and Pimo of Hwen Tsiang, writes Huntington, is a pleasant district, with a population of about fifteen thousand souls." Huntington discusses (p. 387) the theory of Stein:

"Stein identifies Pimo or Pein, with ancient Kenan, the site ... now known as Uzun Tetti or Ulugh Mazar, north of Chira. This identification is doubtful, as appears from the following table of distances given by Hwen Tsiang, which is as accurate as could be expected from a casual traveller.

I have reckoned the 'li,' the Chinese unit of distance, as equivalent to 0.26 of a mile.

Distance according to Names of Places. True Distance. Hwen Tsiang.

Khotan (Yutien) to Keriya (Pimo) 97 miles. 330 li 86 miles.

Keriya (Pimo) to Niya (Niyang) 64 " 200 " 52 "

Niya (Niyang) to Endereh (Tuholo) 94 " 400 " 104 "

Endereh (Tuholo) to Kotak Sheri? (Chemotona) 138? " 600 " 156 "

Kotak Sheri (Chemotona) to Lulan (Nafopo) 264? " 1000 " 260 "

"If we use the value of the 'li' 0.274 of a mile given by Hedin, the distances from Khotan to Keriya and from Keriya to Niya, according to Hwen Tsiang, become 91 and 55 miles instead of 86 and 52 as given in the table, which is not far from the true distances, 97 and 64.

"If, however, Pimo is identical with Kenan, as Stein thinks, the distances which Hwen Tsiang gives as 86 and 52 miles become respectively 60 and 89, which is evidently quite wrong.

"Strong confirmation of the identification of Keriya with Pimo is found in a comparison of extracts from Marco Polo's and Hwen Tsiang's accounts of that city with pa.s.sages from my note-book, written long before I had read the comments of the ancient travellers. Marco Polo says that the people of Pein, or Pima, as he also calls it, have the peculiar custom 'that if a married man goes to a distance from home to be about twenty days, his wife has a right, if she is so inclined, to take another husband; and the men, on the same principle, marry wherever they happen to reside.' The quotation from my notes runs as follows: 'The women of the place are noted for their attractiveness and loose character. It is said that many men coming to Keriya for a short time become enamoured of the women here, and remain permanently, taking new wives and abandoning their former wives and families.'

"Hwen Tsiang observed that thirty 'li,' seven or eight miles, west of Pimo, there is 'a great desert marsh, upwards of several acres in extent, without any verdure whatever. The surface is reddish black.' The natives explained to the pilgrim that it was the blood-stained site of a great battle fought many years before. Eighteen miles north-west of Keriya bazaar, or ten miles from the most westerly village of the oasis, I observed that 'some areas which are flooded part of the year are of a deep rich red colour, due to a small plant two or three inches high.' I saw such vegetation nowhere else and apparently it was an equally unusual sight to Hwen Tsiang.

"In addition to these somewhat conclusive observations, Marco Polo says that jade is found in the river of Pimo, which is true of the Keriya, but not of the Chira, or the other rivers near Kenan." (Ellsworth HUNTINGTON, _The Pulse of Asia_, pp. 387-8.)

XXVIII., p. 194. "The whole of the Province [of Charchan] is sandy, and so is the road all the way from Pein, and much of the water that you find is bitter and bad. However, at some places you do find fresh and sweet water."

Sir Aurel Stein remarks (_Ancient Khotan_, I., p. 436): "Marco Polo's description, too, 'of the Province of Charchan' would agree with the a.s.sumption that the route west of Charchan was not altogether devoid of settlements even as late as the thirteenth century.... [His] account of the route agrees accurately with the conditions now met with between Niya and Charchan. Yet in the pa.s.sage immediately following, the Venetian tells us how 'when an army pa.s.ses through the land, the people escape with their wives, children, and cattle a distance of two or three days' journey into the sandy waste; and, knowing the spots where water is to be had, they are able to live there, and to keep their cattle alive, while it is impossible to discover them.' It seems to me clear that Marco Polo alludes here to the several river courses which, after flowing north of the Niya-Charchan route, lose themselves in the desert. The jungle belt of their terminal areas, no doubt, offered then, as it would offer now, safe places of refuge to any small settlements established along the route southwards."

x.x.xIX., P. 197.

OF THE CITY OF LOP.

Stein remarks, _Ruins of Desert Cathay_, I., p. 343: "Broad geographical facts left no doubt for any one acquainted with local conditions that Marco Polo's Lop, 'a large town at the edge of the Desert'

where 'travellers repose before entering on the Desert' _en route_ for Sha chou and China proper, must have occupied the position of the present Charklik. Nor could I see any reason for placing elsewhere the capital of that 'ancient kingdom of Na-fo-po, the same as the territory of Lou-lan,' which Hiuan Tsang reached after ten marches to the north-east of Chu-mo or Charchan, and which was the pilgrim's last stage before his return to Chinese soil."

In his third journey (1913-1916), Stein left Charchan on New Year's Eve, 1914, and arrived at Charkhlik on January 8, saying: "It was from this modest little oasis, the only settlement of any importance in the Lop region, representing Marco Polo's 'City of Lop,' that I had to raise the whole of the supplies, labour, and extra camels needed by the several parties for the explorations I had carefully planned during the next three months in the desert between Lop-nor and Tunhuang."

"The name of LOB appears under the form _Lo pou_ in the _Yuan-s.h.i.+_, _s.a._ 1282 and 1286. In 1286, it is mentioned as a postal station near those of K'ie-t'ai, Che-ch'an and Wo-tuan. Wo-tuan is Khotan. Che-ch'an, the name of which reappears in other paragraphs, is Charchan. As to K'ie-t'ai, a postal station between those of Lob and Charchan, it seems probable that it is the Katak of the _Tarikh-i-Ras.h.i.+di_." (PELLIOT.)

See in the _Journ. Asiatique_, Jan.-Feb., 1916, pp. 117-119, Pelliot's remarks on _Lob, Navapa_, etc.

x.x.xIX., pp. 196-7.

THE GREAT DESERT.

After reproducing the description of the Great Desert in Sir Henry Yule's version, Stein adds, _Ruins of Desert Cathay_, I., p. 518:

"It did not need my journey to convince me that what Marco here tells us about the risks of the desert was but a faithful reflex of old folklore beliefs he must have heard on the spot. Sir Henry Yule has shown long ago that the dread of being led astray by evil spirits haunted the imagination of all early travellers who crossed the desert wastes between China and the oases westwards. Fa-hsien's above-quoted pa.s.sage clearly alludes to this belief, and so does Hiuan Tsang, as we have seen, where he points in graphic words the impressions left by his journey through the sandy desert between Niya and Charchan.

"Thus, too, the description we receive through the Chinese historiographer, Ma Tuan-lin, of the shortest route from China towards Kara-shahr, undoubtedly corresponding to the present track to Lop-nor, reads almost like a version from Marco's book, though its compiler, a contemporary of the Venetian traveller, must have extracted it from some earlier source. 'You see nothing in any direction but the sky and the sands, without the slightest trace of a road; and travellers find nothing to guide them but the bones of men and beasts and the droppings of camels.

During the pa.s.sage of this wilderness you hear sounds, sometimes of singing, sometimes of wailing; and it has often happened that travellers going aside to see what these sounds might be have strayed from their course and been entirely lost; for they were voices of spirits and goblins.'...

"As Yule rightly observes, 'these Goblins are not peculiar to the Gobi.'

Yet I felt more than ever a.s.sured that Marco's stories about them were of genuine local growth, when I had travelled over the whole route and seen how closely its topographical features agree with the matter-of-fact details which the first part of his chapter records. Antic.i.p.ating my subsequent observations, I may state here at once that Marco's estimate of the distance and the number of marches on this desert crossing proved perfectly correct. For the route from Charklik, his 'town of Lop,' to the 'City of Sachiu,' i.e. Sha-chou or Tun-huang, our plane-table survey, checked by cyclometer readings, showed an aggregate marching distance of close on 380 miles."

x.x.xIX., p. 196.

OF THE CITY OF LOP AND THE GREAT DESERT.

"In the hope of contributing something toward the solution of these questions [contradictory statements of Prjevalsky, Richthofen, and Sven Hedin]," writes Huntington, "I planned to travel completely around the unexplored part of the ancient lake, crossing the Lop desert in its widest part. As a result of the journey, I became convinced that two thousand years ago the lake was of great size, covering both the ancient and the modern locations; then it contracted, and occupied only the site shown on the Chinese maps; again, in the Middle Ages, it expanded; and at present it has contracted and occupies the modern site.

"Now, as in Marco Polo's days, the traveller must equip his caravan for the desert at Charklik, also known as Lop, two days' journey south-west of the lake." (Ellsworth HUNTINGTON, _The Pulse of Asia_, pp. 240-1.)

x.x.xIX., pp. 197, 201.

NOISES IN THE GREAT DESERT.

As an answer to a paper by C. TOMLINSON, in _Nature_, Nov. 28, 1895, p.

78, we find in the same periodical, April 30, 1896, LIII., p. 605, the following note by k.u.mAGUSU MINAKATA: "The following pa.s.sage in a Chinese itinerary of Central Asia--Chun Yuen's _Si-yih-kien-wan-luh_, 1777 (British Museum, No. 15271, b. 14), tom. VII., fol. 13 b.--appears to describe the icy sounds similar to what Ma or Head observed in North America (see supra, ibid., p. 78).

"Muh-suh-urh-tah-fan (= Muzart), that is Ice Mountain [_Snowy_ according to Prjevalsky], is situated between Ili and Us.h.i.+.... In case that one happens to be travelling there close to sunset, he should choose a rock of moderate thickness and lay down on it. In solitary night then, he would hear the sounds, now like those of gongs and bells, and now like those of strings and pipes, which disturb ears through the night: these are produced by multifarious noises coming from the cracking ice."

k.u.magusu Minakata has another note on remarkable sounds in j.a.pan in _Nature_, LIV., May 28, 1896, p. 78.

Sir T. Douglas Forsyth, _Buried Cities in the s.h.i.+fting Sands of the Great Desert of Gobi, Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc._, Nov. 13, 1876, says, p. 29: "The stories told by Marco Polo, in his 39th chapter, about s.h.i.+fting sands and strange noises and demons, have been repeated by other travellers down to the present time. Colonel Prjevalsky, in pp. 193 and 194 of his interesting _Travels_, gives his testimony to the superst.i.tions of the Desert; and I find, on reference to my diary, that the same stories were recounted to me in Kashghar, and I shall be able to show that there is some truth in the report of treasures being exposed to view."

P. 201, Line 12. Read the Governor of Urumtsi _founded_ instead of _found_.

XL., p. 203. Marco Polo comes to a city called Sachiu belonging to a province called Tangut. "The people are for the most part Idolaters....

The Idolaters have a peculiar language, and are no traders, but live by their agriculture. They have a great many abbeys and minsters full of idols of sundry fas.h.i.+ons, to which they pay great honour and reverence, wors.h.i.+pping them and sacrificing to them with much ado."

Sachiu, or rather Tun Hw.a.n.g, is celebrated for its "Caves of Thousand Buddhas"; Sir Aurel Stein wrote the following remarks in his _Ruins of Desert Cathay_, II., p. 27: "Surely it was the sight of these colossal images, some reaching nearly a hundred feet in height, and the vivid first impressions retained of the cult paid to them, which had made Marco Polo put into his chapter on 'Sachiu,' i.e. Tun-huang, a long account of the strange idolatrous customs of the people of Tangut.... Tun-huang manifestly had managed to retain its traditions of Buddhist piety down to Marco's days. Yet there was plentiful antiquarian evidence showing that most of the shrines and art remains at the Halls of the Thousand Buddhas dated back to the period of the T'ang Dynasty, when Buddhism flourished greatly in China.

Tun-huang, as the westernmost outpost of China proper, had then for nearly two centuries enjoyed imperial protection both against the Turks in the north and the Tibetans southward. But during the succeeding period, until the advent of paramount Mongol power, some two generations before Marco Polo's visit, these marches had been exposed to barbarian inroads of all sorts. The splendour of the temples and the number of the monks and nuns established near them had, no doubt, sadly diminished in the interval."

XL., p. 205.

Prof. Pelliot accepts as a Mongol plural _Tangut_, but remarks that it is very ancient, as _Tangut_ is already to be found in the Orkhon inscriptions. At the time of Chingiz, _Tangut_ was a singular in Mongol, and _Tangu_ is nowhere to be found.

XL., p. 206.

The Tangutans are descendants of the Tang-tu-chueh; it must be understood that they are descendants of _T'u Kiueh_ of the T'ang Period. (PELLIOT.)

Lines 7 and 8 from the foot of the page: instead of T'ung hoang, read Tun hoang; Kiu-kaan, read Tsiu tsuan.

XL., p. 207, note 2. The "peculiar language" is si-hia (PELLIOT).

XLI., pp. 210, 212, n. 3.

THE PROVINCE OF CAMUL.