The people live by trade and manufactures, and have great store of silk
[which they weave into various stuffs], and of ginger and galingale.
[NOTE 5] [They also make much cotton cloth of dyed thread, which is sent
all over Manzi.] Their women are particularly beautiful. And there is a
strange thing there which I needs must tell you. You must know they have a
kind of fowls which have no feathers, but hair only, like a cat's fur.
[NOTE 6] They are black all over; they lay eggs just like our fowls, and
are very good to eat.
In the other three days of the six that I have mentioned above[NOTE 7],
you continue to meet with many towns and villages, with traders, and goods
for sale, and craftsmen. The people have much silk, and are Idolaters, and
subject to the Great Kaan. There is plenty of game of all kinds, and there
are great and fierce lions which attack travellers. In the last of those
three days' journey, when you have gone 15 miles you find a city called
UNKEN, where there is an immense quantity of sugar made. From this city
the Great Kaan gets all the sugar for the use of his Court, a quantity
worth a great amount of money. [And before this city came under the Great
Kaan these people knew not how to make fine sugar; they only used to boil
and skim the juice, which when cold left a black paste. But after they
came under the Great Kaan some men of Babylonia who happened to be at the
Court proceeded to this city and taught the people to refine the sugar
with the ashes of certain trees.[NOTE 8]]
There is no more to say of the place, so now we shall speak of the
splendour of Fuju. When you have gone 15 miles from the city of Unken, you
come to this noble city which is the capital of the kingdom. So we will
now tell you what we know of it.
NOTE 1. - The vague description does not suggest the root turmeric with
which Marsden and Pauthier identify this "fruit like saffron." It is
probably one of the species of Gardenia, the fruits of which are used by
the Chinese for their colouring properties. Their splendid yellow colour
"is due to a body named crocine which appears to be identical with the
polychroite of saffron." (Hanbury's Notes on Chinese Mat. Medica, pp.
21-22.) For this identification, I am indebted to Dr. Flueckiger of Bern.
["Colonel Yule concludes that the fruit of a Gardenia, which yields a
yellow colour, is meant. But Polo's vague description might just as well
agree with the Bastard Saffron, Carthamus tinctorius, a plant introduced
into China from Western Asia in the 2nd century B.C., and since then much
cultivated in that country." (Bretschneider, Hist.
