N. China B.R.A.S. XIII.

1879, 1-36.) - H.C.]

NOTE 4. - I think the great horses must be an error, though running through all the texts, and that grant quantite de chevaus was probably intended. Valuable ponies are produced in those regions, but I have never heard of large horses, and Martini's testimony is to like effect (p. 141). Nor can I hear of any race in those regions in modern times that uses what we should call long stirrups. It is true that the Tartars rode very short - "brevissimas habent strepas," as Carpini says (643); and the Kirghiz Kazaks now do the same. Both Burmese and Shans ride what we should call short; and Major Sladen observes of the people on the western border of Yun-nan: "Kachyens and Shans ride on ordinary Chinese saddles. The stirrups are of the usual average length, but the saddles are so constructed as to rise at least a foot above the pony's back." He adds with reference to another point in the text: "I noticed a few Shan ponies with docked tails. But the more general practice is to loop up the tail in a knot, the object being to protect the rider, or rather his clothes, from the dirt with which they would otherwise be spattered from the flipping of the animal's tail." (MS. Notes.)

[After Yung-ch'ang, Captain Gill writes (II. p. 356): "The manes were hogged and the tails cropped of a great many of the ponies these men were riding; but there were none of the docked tails mentioned by Marco Polo." - H.C.]

Armour of boiled leather - "armes cuiraces de cuir bouilli"; so Pauthier's text; the material so often mentioned in mediaeval costume; e.g. in the leggings of Sir Thopas: -

"His jambeux were of cuirbouly, His swerdes sheth of ivory, His helme of latoun bright."

But the reading of the G. Text which is "cuir de bufal," is probably the right one. Some of the Miau-tzu of Kweichau are described as wearing armour of buffalo-leather overlaid with iron plates. (Ritter, IV. 768-776.) Arblasts or crossbows are still characteristic weapons of many of the wilder tribes of this region; e.g. of some of the Singphos, of the Mishmis of Upper Assam, of the Lu-tzu of the valley of the Lukiang, of tribes of the hills of Laos, of the Stiens of Cambodia, and of several of the Miau-tzu tribes of the interior of China. We give a cut copied from a Chinese work on the Miau-tzu of Kweichau in Dr. Lockhart's possession, which shows three little men of the Sang-Miau tribe of Kweichau combining to mend a crossbow, and a chief with armes cuiraces and jambeux also. [The cut (p. 83) is well explained by this passage of Baber's Travels among the Lolos (p. 71): "They make their own swords, three and a half to five spans long, with square heads, and have bows which it takes three men to draw, but no muskets." - H.C.]

NOTE 5. - I have nowhere met with a precise parallel to this remarkable superstition, but the following piece of Folk-Lore has a considerable analogy to it. This extraordinary custom is ascribed by Ibn Fozlan to the Bulgarians of the Volga: "If they find a man endowed with special intelligence then they say: 'This man should serve our Lord God;' and so they take him, run a noose round his neck and hang him on a tree, where they leave him till the corpse falls to pieces." This is precisely what Sir Charles Wood did with the Indian Corps of Engineers; - doubtless on the same principle.

Archbishop Trench, in a fine figure, alludes to a belief prevalent among the Polynesian Islanders, "that the strength and valour of the warriors whom they have slain in battle passes into themselves, as their rightful inheritance." (Fraehn, Wolga-Bulgaren, p. 50; Studies in the Gospels, p. 22; see also Lubbock, 457.)

[Illustration: The Sangmiau Tribe of Kweichau, with the Crossbow. (From a Chinese Drawing.)

"Ont armes corases de cuir de bufal, et ont lances et scuz et ont balestres."]

There is some analogy also to the story Polo tells, in the curious Sindhi tradition, related by Burton, of Baha-ul-hakk, the famous saint of Multan. When he visited his disciples at Tatta they plotted his death, in order to secure the blessings of his perpetual presence. The people of Multan are said to have murdered two celebrated saints with the same view, and the Hazaras to "make a point of killing and burying in their own country any stranger indiscreet enough to commit a miracle or show any particular sign of sanctity." The like practice is ascribed to the rude Moslem of Gilghit; and such allegations must have been current in Europe, for they are the motive of Southey's St. Romuald:

"'But,' quoth the Traveller, 'wherefore did he leave A flock that knew his saintly worth so well?'

"'Why, Sir,' the Host replied, 'We thought perhaps that he might one day leave us; And then, should strangers have The good man's grave, A loss like that would naturally grieve us; For he'll be made a saint of, to be sure. Therefore we thought it prudent to secure His relics while we might; And so we meant to strangle him one night.'"

(See Sindh, pp. 86, 388; Ind. Antiq. I. 13; Southey's Ballads, etc., ed. Routledge, p. 330.)

[Captain Gill (I. p. 323) says that he had made up his mind to visit a place called Li-fan Fu, near Ch'eng-tu. "I was told," he writes, "that this place was inhabited by the Man-Tzu, or Barbarians, as the Chinese call them; and Monseigneur Pinchon told me that, amongst other pleasing theories, they were possessed of the belief that if they poisoned a rich man, his wealth would accrue to the poisoner; that, therefore, the hospitable custom prevailed amongst them of administering poison to rich or noble guests; that this poison took no effect for some time, but that in the course of two or three months it produced a disease akin to dysentery, ending in certain death." - H.C.]

[1] Mr. E.H. Parker writes (China Review, XXIV.

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