CHAPTER I - ‘A RICH AND NOBLE CITY’

Summary

Marco Polo thus describes the plain and city of Ch'êng-Tu-Fu :

‘When you have travelled those twenty days westward through the mountains, as I have told you, then you arrive at a plain belonging to a province called Sindafu, which still is on the confines of Manzi, and the capital city of which is also called Sindafu. This city was in former days a rich and noble one, and the kings who reigned there were very great and wealthy.

‘It is a good twenty miles in compass; but it is divided in the way that 1 shall tell you.

‘You see, the king of this province, in the days of old, when he found himself drawing near to death, leaving three sons behind him, commanded that the city should be divided into three parts, and that each of his sons should have one; so each of these parts is separately walled about, though all three are surrounded by the common wall of the city. Each of the three sons was king, having his own part of the city and his own share of the kingdom, and each of them in fact was a great and wealthy king. But the Great Kaan conquered the kingdom of these three kings, and stripped them of their inheritance.

‘Through the midst of this city runs a large river, in which they catch a great quantity of fish.