In the other three days of the six that I have mentioned above[NOTE 7], you continue to meet with many towns and villages, with traders, and goods for sale, and craftsmen.  The people have much silk, and are Idolaters, and subject to the Great Kaan.  There is plenty of game of all kinds, and there are great and fierce lions which attack travellers.  In the last of those three days’ journey, when you have gone 15 miles you find a city called UNKEN, where there is an immense quantity of sugar made.  From this city the Great Kaan gets all the sugar for the use of his Court, a quantity worth a great amount of money. [And before this city came under the Great Kaan these people knew not how to make fine sugar; they only used to boil and skim the juice, which when cold left a black paste.  But after they came under the Great Kaan some men of Babylonia who happened to be at the Court proceeded to this city and taught the people to refine the sugar with the ashes of certain trees.[NOTE 8]]

There is no more to say of the place, so now we shall speak of the splendour of Fuju.  When you have gone 15 miles from the city of Unken, you come to this noble city which is the capital of the kingdom.  So we will now tell you what we know of it.

NOTE 1.—­The vague description does not suggest the root turmeric with which Marsden and Pauthier identify this “fruit like saffron.”  It is probably one of the species of Gardenia, the fruits of which are used by the Chinese for their colouring properties.  Their splendid yellow colour “is due to a body named crocine which appears to be identical with the polychroite of saffron.” (Hanbury’s Notes on Chinese Mat.  Medica, pp. 21-22.) For this identification, I am indebted to Dr. Flueckiger of Bern. ["Colonel Yule concludes that the fruit of a Gardenia, which yields a yellow colour, is meant.  But Polo’s vague description might just as well agree with the Bastard Saffron, Carthamus tinctorius, a plant introduced into China from Western Asia in the 2nd century B.C., and since then much cultivated in that country.” (Bretschneider, Hist. of Bot.  Disc. I. p. 4.)—­H.C.]

[Illustration:  Scene in the Bohea Mountains, on Polo’s route between Kiang-si and Fo-kien (From Fortune.)

“Adonc entre l’en en roiaume de Fugin, et ici comance.  Et ala siz jornee por montangnes e por bales....”]

NOTE 2.—­See vol. i. p. 312.

NOTE 3.—­These particulars as to a race of painted or tattooed caterans accused of cannibalism apparently apply to some aboriginal tribe which still maintained its ground in the mountains between Fo-kien and Che-kiang or Kiang-si.  Davis, alluding to the Upper part of the Province of Canton, says:  “The Chinese History speaks of the aborigines of this wild region under the name of Man (Barbarians), who within a comparatively recent period were subdued and incorporated into the Middle Nation.  Many persons have remarked a decidedly Malay cast in the