We will now set forth again, and travel three days towards the south, and then we come to a town called CHANGLU.  This is another great city belonging to the Great Kaan, and to the province of Cathay.  The people have paper-money, and are Idolaters and burn their dead.  And you must know they make salt in great quantities at this place; I will tell you how ’tis done.[NOTE 2]

A kind of earth is found there which is exceedingly salt.  This they dig up and pile in great heaps.  Upon these heaps they pour water in quantities till it runs out at the bottom; and then they take up this water and boil it well in great iron cauldrons, and as it cools it deposits a fine white salt in very small grains.  This salt they then carry about for sale to many neighbouring districts, and get great profit thereby.

There is nothing else worth mentioning, so let us go forward five days’ journey, and we shall come to a city called Chinangli.

NOTE 1.—­In the greater part of the journey which occupies the remainder of Book II., Pauthier is a chief authority, owing to his industrious Chinese reading and citation.  Most of his identifications seem well founded, though sometimes we shall be constrained to dissent from them widely.  A considerable number have been anticipated by former editors, but even in such cases he is often able to bring forward new grounds.

CACANFU is HO-KIEN FU in Pe Chih-li, 52 miles in a direct line south by east of Chochau.  It was the head of one of the Lu or circuits into which the Mongols divided China. (Pauthier.)

NOTE 2.—­Marsden and Murray have identified Changlu with T’SANG-CHAU in Pe Chih-li, about 30 miles east by south of Ho-kien fu.  This seems substantially right, but Pauthier shows that there was an old town actually called CH’ANGLU, separated from T’sang-chau only by the great canal. [Ch’ang-lu was the name of T’sang-chau under the T’ang and the Kin.  (See Playfair, Dict., p. 34.)—­H.C.]

The manner of obtaining salt, described in the text, is substantially the same as one described by Duhalde, and by one of the missionaries, as being employed near the mouth of the Yang-tzu kiang.  There is a town of the third order some miles south-east of T’sang-chau, called Yen-shan or “salt-hill,” and, according to Pauthier, T’sang-chau is the mart for salt produced there. (Duhalde in Astley, IV. 310; Lettres Edif. XI. 267 seqq.; Biot. p. 283.)

Polo here introduces a remark about the practice of burning the dead, which, with the notice of the idolatry of the people, and their use of paper-money, constitutes a formula which he repeats all through the Chinese provinces with wearisome iteration.  It is, in fact, his definition of the Chinese people, for whom he seems to lack a comprehensive name.