Nor is it only palaces which Marco Polo describes, for he tells of the great canal and inland river trade of China, the exports and imports at its harbours, the paper money, the system of posts and caravanserais, which linked it together.  He gives an unsurpassed picture of that huge, rich, peaceful empire, full of wealth and commerce and learned men and beautiful things, and of its ruler Kublai Khan, one of the noblest monarchs who ever sat upon a throne, who, since ’China is a sea that salts all the rivers that flow into it,’[21] was far more than a barbarous Mongol khan, was in very truth a Chinese emperor, whose house, called by the Chinese the ‘Yuan Dynasty’, takes its place among the great dynasties of China.

Even more than Marco Polo tells us he must, indeed, have seen.  The impersonality of the greater part of the book is its one blemish, for we would fain know more of how he lived in China.  There is some evidence that he consorted with the Mongol conquerors rather than with the Chinese, and that Chinese was not one of the languages which he learned.  He makes no mention of several characteristic Chinese customs, such as the compressed feet of the women, and fishing with cormorants (both of which are described by Ordoric of Pordenone after him); he travelled through the tea districts of Fo-kien, but he never mentions tea-drinking, and he has no word to say even of the Great Wall.[22] And how typical a European he is, in some ways, for all his keen interest in new and strange things.  ‘They are,’ he says of the peaceful merchants and scholars of Suchow, ’a pusillanimous race and solely occupied with their trade and manufactures.  In these indeed they display considerable ability, and if they were as enterprising, manly, and warlike as they are ingenious, so prodigious is their number that they might not only subdue the whole of the province, but carry their rule further still.’[23] Nearly five hundred years later we find the same judgement expressed in different words:  ’Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.’  The answer is a question:  Would you rather be the pusillanimous Chinese, who painted the landscape roll of which a portion is reproduced opposite page 52, or the enterprising, manly, and warlike European of the same period, whose highest achievement in pictorial art is the picture of Marco Polo’s embarkation, reproduced opposite page 21?  What is civilization and what progress?  Yet Marco Polo shows himself throughout his book far from unable to appreciate other standards than those of his own land and religion, for of Sakya-muni Buddha he says that, ’had he been a Christian he would have been a great saint of our Lord Jesus Christ,’ and he could honour Kublai as that great Khan deserved.