the port of the province.  Here every year came a hundred times more pepper than came to the whole of Christendom through the Levantine ports.  Here from Indo China and the Indies came spices and aloes and sandalwood, nutmegs, spikenard and ebony, and riches beyond mention.  Big junks laded these things, together with musk from Tibet, and bales of silk from all the cities of Mansi[C], and sailed away in and out of the East India Archipelago, with its spice-laden breezes billowing their sails, to Ceylon.  There merchants from Malabar and the great trading cities of southern India took aboard their cargoes and sold them in turn to Arab merchants, who in their turn sold them to the Venetians in one or other of the Levantine ports.  Europeans who saw Zaiton and the other Chinese seaports in after years were wont to say that no one, not even a Venetian, could picture to himself the multitude of trading vessels which sailed upon those eastern seas and crowded into those Chinese harbours.  They said also with one accord that Kinsai was without doubt the finest and richest and noblest city in the world.  To the men of Kinsai, Venice would have been a little suburb and the Levant a backyard.  The whole of the east was their trading field, and their wealth and civilization were already old when Venice was a handful of mud huts peopled by fishermen.

[Footnote C:  Mansi or Manji was southern China and Cathay was northern China, the boundary between them lying along the River Hoang-Ho on the east and the southern boundary of Shensi on the west.]

Nor was Kinsai alone and unmatched in all its wonder and beauty, for a three days’ journey from it stood Sugui, which today we call Suchow, lying also on the great canal, with its circumference of twenty miles, its prodigious multitudes swarming the streets, its physicians, philosophers, and magicians; Sugui, with the ginger which was so common that forty pounds of it might be bought for the price of a Venetian silver groat, the silk which was manufactured in such vast quantities that all the citizens were dressed in it and still ships laden with it sailed away; Sugui under whose jurisdiction were sixteen wealthy cities, where trade and the arts flourished.  If you had not seen Hangchow, you would have said that there was no city in the world, not Venice nor Constantinople nor another worthy to be named in the same breath with Sugui.  The Chinese indeed, seeing the riches and beauty of these two cities, doubted whether even the pleasant courts of heaven could show their equal and proudly quoted the proverb: 

Shang yeu t’ien t’ang, Hia yeu Su Hang.

(There’s Paradise above, ’tis true,
But here below we’ve Hang and Su.)[13]