NOTE 1.—­The word Emperor stands here for Seigneur.

What the four characters acquired by Marco were is open to discussion.

The Chronicle of the Mongol Emperors rendered by Gaubil mentions, as characters used in their Empire, the Uighur, the Persian and Arabic, that of the Lamas (Tibetan), that of the Niuche, introduced by the Kin Dynasty, the Khitan, and the Bashpah character, a syllabic alphabet arranged, on the basis of the Tibetan and Sanskrit letters chiefly, by a learned chief Lama so-called, under the orders of Kublai, and established by edict in 1269 as the official character.  Coins bearing this character, and dating from 1308 to 1354, are extant.  The forms of the Niuche and Khitan were devised in imitation of Chinese writing, but are supposed to be syllabic.  Of the Khitan but one inscription was known, and no key.  “The Khitan had two national scripts, the ‘small characters’ (hsiao tzu) and the ’large characters’ (ta tzu).”  S. W. Bushell, Insc. in the Juchen and Allied Scripts, Cong. des Orientalistes, Paris, 1897.—­Die Sprache und Schrift der Juchen von Dr. W. Grube, Leipzig, 1896, from a polyglot MS. dictionary, discovered by Dr. F. Hirth and now kept in the Royal Library, Berlin.—­H.  Y. and H. C.

Chinghiz and his first successors used the Uighur, and sometimes the Chinese character.  Of the Uighur character we give a specimen in Bk.  IV.  It is of Syriac origin, undoubtedly introduced into Eastern Turkestan by the early Nestorian missions, probably in the 8th or 9th century.  The oldest known example of this character so applied, the Kudatku Bilik, a didactic poem in Uighur (a branch of Oriental Turkish), dating from A.D. 1069, was published by Prof.  Vambery in 1870.  A new edition of the Kudatku Bilik was published at St. Petersburg, in 1891, by Dr. W. Radloff.  Vambery had a pleasing illustration of the origin of the Uighur character, when he received a visit at Pesth from certain Nestorians of Urumia on a begging tour.  On being shown the original MS. of the Kudatku Bilik, they read the character easily, whilst much to their astonishment they could not understand a word of what was written.  This Uighur is the basis of the modern Mongol and Manchu characters. (Cf.  E. Bretschneider, Mediaeval Researches, I. pp. 236, 263.)—­H.  Y. and H. C.

[Illustration:  Hexaglot Inscription on the East side of the Kiu Yong Kwan]

[Illustration:  Hexaglot Inscription on the West side of the Kiu Yong Kwan]

[At the village of Keuyung Kwan, 40 miles north of Peking, in the sub-prefecture of Ch’ang Ping, in the Chih-li province, the road from Peking to Kalgan runs beyond the pass of Nankau, under an archway, a view of which will be found at the end of this volume, on which were engraved, in 1345, two large inscriptions in six different languages:  Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongol, Bashpah, Uighur, Chinese, and a language