Now we will quit that province and go three days’ journey forward.

NOTE 1.—­Marco’s own errors led commentators much astray about Tanduc or Tenduc, till Klaproth put the matter in its true light.

Our traveller says that Tenduc had been the seat of Aung Khan’s sovereignty; he has already said that it had been the scene of his final defeat, and he tells us that it was still the residence of his descendants in their reduced state.  To the last piece of information he can speak as a witness, and he is corroborated by other evidence; but the second statement we have seen to be almost certainly erroneous; about the first we cannot speak positively.

Klaproth pointed out the true position of Tenduc in the vicinity of the great northern bend of the Hwang-Ho, quoting Chinese authorities to show that Thiante or Thiante-Kiun was the name of a district or group of towns to the north of that bend, a name which he supposes to be the original of Polo’s Tenduc.  The general position entirely agrees with Marco’s indications; it lies on his way eastward from Tangut towards Chagannor, and Shangtu (see ch. lx., lxi.), whilst in a later passage (Bk.  II. ch. lxiv.), he speaks of the Caramoran or Hwang-Ho in its lower course, as “coming from the lands of Prester John.”

M. Pauthier finds severe fault with Klaproth’s identification of the name Tenduc with the Thiante of the Chinese, belonging to a city which had been destroyed 300 years before, whilst he himself will have that name to be a corruption of Tathung.  The latter is still the name of a city and Fu of northern Shansi, but in Mongol time its circle of administration extended beyond the Chinese wall, and embraced territory on the left of the Hwang-Ho, being in fact the first Lu, or circle, entered on leaving Tangut, and therefore, Pauthier urges, the “Kingdom of Tanduc” of our text.

I find it hard to believe that Marco could get no nearer TATHUNG than in the form of Tanduc or Tenduc.  The origin of the last may have been some Mongol name, not recovered.  But it is at least conceivable that a name based on the old Thiante-Kiun might have been retained among the Tartars, from whom, and not from the Chinese, Polo took his nomenclature.  Thiante had been, according to Pauthier’s own quotations, the military post of Tathung; Klaproth cites a Chinese author of the Mongol era, who describes the Hwang-Ho as passing through the territory of the ancient Chinese city of Thiante; and Pauthier’s own quotation from the Modern Imperial Geography seems to imply that a place in that territory was recently known as Fung-chau-Thiante-Kiun.