["The Palace of canes is probably the Palm Hall, Tsung tien, alias Tsung mao tien, of the Chinese authors, which was situated in the western palace garden of Shangtu.  Mention is made also in the Altan Tobchi of a cane tent in Shangtu.” (Palladius, p. 27.)—­H.  C.]

[Illustration:  Pavilion at Yuen-ming-Yuen.]

Marco might well say of the bamboo that “it serves also a great variety of other purposes.”  An intelligent native of Arakan who accompanied me in wanderings on duty in the forests of the Burmese frontier in the beginning of 1853, and who used to ask many questions about Europe, seemed able to apprehend almost everything except the possibility of existence in a country without bamboos!  “When I speak of bamboo huts, I mean to say that posts and walls, wall-plates and rafters, floor and thatch, and the withes that bind them, are all of bamboo.  In fact, it might almost be said that among the Indo-Chinese nations the staff of life is a bamboo! Scaffolding and ladders, landing-jetties, fishing apparatus, irrigation wheels and scoops, oars, masts, and yards [and in China, sails, cables, and caulking, asparagus, medicine, and works of fantastic art], spears and arrows, hats and helmets, bow, bowstring and quiver, oil-cans, water-stoups and cooking-pots, pipe-sticks [tinder and means of producing fire], conduits, clothes-boxes, pawn-boxes, dinner-trays, pickles, preserves, and melodious musical instruments, torches, footballs, cordage, bellows, mats, paper; these are but a few of the articles that are made from the bamboo;” and in China, to sum up the whole, as Barrow observes, it maintains order throughout the Empire! (Ava Mission, p. 153; and see also Wallace, Ind.  Arch. I. 120 seqq.)

NOTE 5.—­“The Emperor ... began this year (1264) to depart from Yenking (Peking) in the second or third month for Shangtu, not returning until the eighth month.  Every year he made this passage, and all the Mongol emperors who succeeded him followed his example.” (Gaubil, p. 144.)

["The Khans usually resorted to Shangtu in the 4th moon and returned to Peking in the 9th.  On the 7th day of the 7th moon there were libations performed in honour of the ancestors; a shaman, his face to the north, uttered in a loud voice the names of Chingiz Khan and of other deceased Khans, and poured mare’s milk on the ground.  The propitious day for the return journey to Peking was also appointed then.” (Palladius, p. 26.)—­H.  C.]

NOTE 6.—­White horses were presented in homage to the Kaan on New Year’s Day (the White Feast), as we shall see below. (Bk.  II. ch. xv.) Odoric also mentions this practice; and, according to Huc, the Mongol chiefs continued it at least to the time of the Emperor K’ang-hi.  Indeed Timkowski speaks of annual tributes of white camels and white horses from the Khans of the Kalkas and other Mongol dignitaries, in the present century. (Huc’s Tartary, etc.; Tim. II. 33.)