In those provinces they are wont to expose their newborn babes; I speak of the poor, who have not the means of bringing them up.  But the King used to have all those foundlings taken charge of, and had note made of the signs and planets under which each was born, and then put them out to nurse about the country.  And when any rich man was childless he would go to the King and obtain from him as many of these children as he desired.  Or, when the children grew up, the King would make up marriages among them, and provide for the couples from his own purse.  In this manner he used to provide for some 20,000 boys and girls every year.[NOTE 7]

I will tell you another thing this King used to do.  If he was taking a ride through the city and chanced to see a house that was very small and poor standing among other houses that were fine and large, he would ask why it was so, and they would tell him it belonged to a poor man who had not the means to enlarge it.  Then the King would himself supply the means.  And thus it came to pass that in all the capital of the kingdom of Manzi, Kinsay by name, you should not see any but fine houses.

This King used to be waited on by more than a thousand young gentlemen and ladies, all clothed in the richest fashion.  And he ruled his realm with such justice that no malefactors were to be found therein.  The city in fact was so secure that no man closed his doors at night, not even in houses and shops that were full of all sorts of rich merchandize.  No one could do justice in the telling to the great riches of that country, and to the good disposition of the people.  Now that I have told you about the kingdom, I will go back to the Queen.

You must know that she was conducted to the Great Kaan, who gave her an honourable reception, and caused her to be served with all state, like a great lady as she was.  But as for the King her husband, he never more did quit the isles of the sea to which he had fled, but died there.  So leave we him and his wife and all their concerns, and let us return to our story, and go on regularly with our account of the great province of Manzi and of the manners and customs of its people.  And, to begin at the beginning, we must go back to the city of Coiganju, from which we digressed to tell you about the conquest of Manzi.

NOTE 1.—­Faghfur or Baghbur was a title applied by old Persian and Arabic writers to the Emperor of China, much in the way that we used to speak of the Great Mogul, and our fathers of the Sophy.  It is, as Neumann points out, an old Persian translation of the Chinese title Tien-tzu, “Son of Heaven”; Bagh-Pur = “The Son of the Divinity,” as Sapor or Shah-Pur = “The Son of the King.” Faghfur seems to have been used as a proper name in Turkestan. (See Baber, 423.)

There is a word, Takfur, applied similarly by the Mahomedans to the Greek emperors of both Byzantium and Trebizond (and also to the Kings of Cilician Armenia), which was perhaps adopted as a jingling match to the former term; Faghfur, the great infidel king in the East; Takfur, the great infidel king in the West.  Defremery says this is Armenian, Tagavor, “a king.” (I.B., II. 393, 427.)