Retracing Marco Polo's journey along the Silk Road

In the Taxkorgan River Valley, in farthest western China, the home of Bibi Mu crouches low upon the earth, its mud walls almost invisible in the bleak end-of-winter landscape. A few miles to the west an ancient track drops into the valley from the snowbound heights of the Pamir mountain range. On this route probably came, in the year 1274 or early 1275, the small caravan of Marco Polo, his father, Niccolò, and his uncle, Maffeo. After struggling across the Pamirs from what is now Afghanistan, they were surely half-starved, and I'd guess that they stopped at a house like Bibi Mu's seeking food. 

Maybe the Polos were escorted into a low-ceilinged room with bright carpets on the floor and more carpets on the walls, as I was escorted by Bibi Mu. The matriarch of her family, she reckoned her age in the 70s and had skin burned to leather by sun and wind. On her hands were five rings with worn stones of red and green. The elder Polos would have noted those; jewelry was their business. And Marco, who was 20 or 21, would have feasted his eyes upon the handsome dark-eyed granddaughters who brought disks of nan and bowls of hot sheep's milk with tea. 

Such, I think, was the welcome the Polos received at this threshold of modern China. Their real threshold was months away: Here it was cold and treeless, and the people spoke Persian and Turkic languages, for most had Central Asian roots. Moreover, in the 13th century this territory had been swallowed by the vast Mongol Empire. But every step brought the Polos closer to the great cities of the Chinese East, rich in silk and spices and jewels, the tantalizing stuff of Marco Polo's book, The Description of the World. 

Guided by that account, photographer Mike Yamashita and I had traced Marco's journey through Iran and much of Afghanistan. Now we would follow him as he rode 2,600 miles from the wastes of China's Xinjiang region to Shangdu (also known as Xanadu), the sumptuous summer capital of the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, and then to the new city Kublai was building—Daidu, today part of Beijing. 

During Marco's 17 years in China, Kublai employed him as a trusted courier and sent him afar, Marco wrote, giving him the opportunity to explore "more of those strange regions than any man who was ever born." That's a big boast. But, in fact, no other European had seen so much of China. 

As I followed his track into "those strange regions," I found that many of the customs that intrigued him still survived. In Yunnan Province, for example, he reported on people who dined on raw flesh; I ate with them one day. In eastern China I looked up his old haunts, such as Yangzhou, where he claimed to have been governor, and elegant Hangzhou, which in Marco's time was the world's largest city; with 1.5 million people it was 15 times as populous as his native Venice. 

Descending from the cold Pamir flank, the Polos faced a different challenge. They were at the edge of the vast Taklimakan Desert, whose name means something like "go in and you won't come out." Marco seldom reports on the Polos' means of transport, but in this bitter and windswept realm, where precipitation is half an inch a year—if that—they were most likely plodding along on double humped Bactrian camels at the anesthetic rate of 15 miles a day. 

A sinew of asphalt traces part of their route now, skirting the Taklimakan's southern rim and tying together a string of infrequent oases. I bumped along this road in an air-conditioned cocoon, an SUV. For the first couple of hundred miles I crossed great shingles of gravel, a kind of desert the Chinese call gobi. The sand that once mingled with those stones lies today in the next county to the east, or beyond, borne off by the wind. Ahead on the road appeared a fringe of poplars, the windbreaks of a town. Marco seemed amazed by the provender of such oases. He wrote of one, "They have great abundance of all things." Ancient irrigation channels still nurture the farmlands with snowmelt from the Kunlun mountain range, a faint gleam far to the south. 

But as the Polos plodded on, rivers and oases became scarce and sand dunes rose ever higher, until they looked like mountains. The toughest stretch of their desert journey was at hand, where "nothing to eat is found" and "you must always go a day and a night before you find water." The Polos loaded a month's supply of food for themselves and their animals. They probably hired a couple of cameleers to help with their pack string, and perhaps they joined a caravan of traders who knew the location of water holes. 

There is a sensuous allure in the curving, swelling architecture of dunes. They are also deceitful. One day I was sure I saw a great lake ahead, with boats. Just mirages, of course. But a traveler half-crazed by thirst could go fatally astray while pursuing such a vision. Marco wrote of spirits that could lure away a straggler, calling him by name in voices that sounded like his companions'. "It often seems to you that you hear many instruments sounding," he also wrote, "and especially drums." 

Practical men say these eerie sounds are produced by moving sand or by wind in the dunes. "The old people believe they are hearing devils speak," said a farmer at an oasis. He rejected this as superstition but confessed, "One night I heard, three times, a terrible noise, like crying, like someone dying." 

I went to this oasis, named Nanhu, with a small, indefatigable historian, Li Zhengyu. We traveled together for about two weeks while I soaked up his encyclopedic knowledge of the Silk Road. "The Polos certainly stopped to water here," he said at Nanhu's springs, conjuring a picture of Marco leading camels to drink. And then Professor Li led me to the ruins of a town, almost buried in dunes. To judge by the visible walls, it had been about the size of two football fields. "This was Shou Chang Cheng, an outpost of the Han dynasty that was mentioned in records in 110 B.C.,' he said. "Marco Polo must have spent the night within these walls—there was no other town for miles." 

By now the Polos had traveled perhaps 1,300 miles in China—about half the way to Shangdu—and had put the dreaded Taklimakan behind them. In what is now Gansu Province they reached Shazhou, a hub of trade routes, and Marco entered a new world, mingling for the first time with large numbers of Chinese, as well as Mongols and a local people related to the Tibetans, the Tanguts. Most, Marco wrote, were "idolaters.... they have many abbeys and many monasteries which are all full of idols of many kinds, to which they do great sacrifice and great honor." Shazhou, now named Dunhuang, was one of China's greatest Buddhist centers. 

(The surprising detour of the Silk Road, the world’s original superhighway)

Though the old monasteries no longer exist, in a cliffside are nearly 500 grottoes crammed with statues and paintings, many dating from the sixth or seventh centuries. Did Marco crane to see the face of the Buddha rising 85 feet in one of these niches? Did he stand before the reclining Buddha that stretches 52 feet amid a phalanx of 72 smaller statues? Later in his travels Marco admired monks and wrote that the Buddha, had he been Christian, would have been a saint. But he ignored Shazhou's grottoes. Maybe he didn't see them. Or maybe, beholding such a panoply of strange religious art, he was simply overwhelmed. 

He was more comfortable writing about material things, such as fireproof cloth. "I saw them myself," he said of the fibers, which were asbestos. Europeans believed such fibers came from an animal—a salamander, yet—that lived in fire. Marco learned they were mineral, mined in China. 

Another subject that got Marco's attention: sex. In a province near his route, he said, if a stranger comes to a man's house to lodge, the man "tells his wife to do all that the stranger wishes.... And the stranger stays with his wife in the house and does as he likes and lies with her in a bed." The women, he added, are "fair and gay and wanton." 

Marco did not reveal how he knew this. But historians say the report rings true. "Minority peoples had this custom," Professor Li said. "They thought outsiders were distinguished and would bring their family new blood and a better future." 

Sometimes, as Professor Li and I followed the old Silk Road through Gansu Province, we were in sight of a wall—miles of it. Critics who doubt that Marco reached China, who believe he merely collected other travelers' tales, cite as evidence his failure to mention the Great Wall. 

Chinese scholars, who generally hold Marco in high regard—he was, after all, the greatest PR man China ever had—call this argument absurd. As they point out, the Great Wall that all the world knows about, with sides and parapets of brick and stone, didn't exist in Marco's time; it was built after the Mongol dynasty was overthrown. 

"What you're seeing is a wall built by the Han dynasty about 1,400 years before Marco came," Professor Li said of the packed earth construction that our highway followed. "It protected the Han territory from nomadic raiders." Originally it was about 30 feet high; parts still rise to 10 feet today. 

By Marco's time it had long been abandoned; hence he had no reason to mention it. Perhaps he omitted walls because they were commonplace. Many cities of Europe were walled, as were many he had seen in Central Asia. 

One morning as we cruised along in our SUV, Professor Li began to sing a song that I remembered from Sunday school: 

Jesus loves me, this I know, 
For the Bible tells me so... 

"I went to a missionary school for 12 years," he said. "And I was baptized." 

The missionaries left after the Communists came to power in 1949. Later, as a critic of government policy, Li spent years at hard labor and as a peasant before being "rehabilitated" and allowed to teach. 

"It's been a long time since I sang Christian songs aloud" he said. "But sometimes I sang them in my heart." He started "Holy, Holy, Holy!" and I joined in. Next, "Silent Night." It was a right good choir practice we had while cruising the Silk Road at 60 miles an hour. We both cried a little. 

In the towns on our route—Anxi, Yumen, Zhangye—night brought crowds to small cafés where the wheat stretcher, the lamian de, performed. I watched a young man named Tang as he massaged a lump of dough, then drew it out to a length of about five feet. Then his arms flexed, his fingers twitched in cat's cradle maneuvers, and suddenly the dough strand doubled, then quadrupled and octupled. Tang flipped the noodles into a bubbling cauldron and minutes later dipped out a bowl of soup—pasta, chilies, greens, a bit of meat. It made a 20-cent supper. 

Noodles, ancient Chinese fare, are so popular today that schools teach the stretching arts. Some stretchers claim they can craft ten shapes, from half an inch wide down to "silk hair" and even triangular noodles. 

Marco must have seen wheat stretchers at work. One version of his book—there are about 150 versions, owing to the many scribes and printers who added, subtracted, and mistranslated—declares that the Chinese do not make bread from their wheat but eat it "only as macaroni and other viands made of dough." That doesn't mean Marco took pasta home to Italy, as has been claimed. Italy already was eating noodles. 

Marco's doubters have taken aim at him at table: If he really went to China, why didn't he mention tea and chopsticks? By the evidence of his book, for drink he preferred something stronger. He invariably mentions, and frequently praises, local firewaters, made of everything from grapes and dates to mare's milk and palm tree sap. I conclude he simply found tea uninteresting. As for chopsticks: Marco spent much of his time with other foreigners. When dining with Mongols or Persians, he probably used a knife to slice meat and ate everything else with his hands, as they did. 

News of the Polos' approach sped along Kublai Khan's pony express message system, and from his summer capital at Shangdu the monarch sent envoys to escort the travelers when they were still 40 days distant. 

Shangdu stood in a wide, shallow valley in what is now Nei Mongol—Inner Mongolia. The Polos had journeyed from Venice "quite three years and a half" to kneel before Kublai. He was, Marco told Europeans (who knew next to nothing of him), "the most powerful man in people and in lands and in treasure that ever was in the world"—probably not an exaggeration. 

As Marco recounts the first audience at court, Kublai was an unmagisterial Mister Congeniality, spouting pleasantries: Welcome, gentlemen! Please stand up. How've you been? How was the trip? In fact, Kublai probably considered it a great honor that Europeans—rare in China—had made the arduous journey to his court. 

Niccolò and Maffeo already had traveled once to Kublai's empire, and the monarch had asked them to return with a hundred wise men to preach Christianity. Like his grandfather, Genghis Khan, Kublai was generally tolerant of all faiths; quite a few of his kin were Christians of the eastern Nestorian sect. Kublai surely was disappointed to hear that the church had not provided the hundred wise men. But at least the Polos had fulfilled his other request, bringing oil from Jesus' sepulchre, considered a powerful elixir. 

Marco estimated Shangdu's square city wall at 16 miles around, presumably using Venetian miles, slightly longer than today's. Chinese archaeologists told me the wall was much shorter—only 5.5 statute miles. Within were monasteries of "idolaters," mainly Buddhists, who provided Kublai with astrologers and sorcerers. Only rubble remains; Shangdu was destroyed after Kublai's dynasty was overthrown in 1368. 

Still, walking on the rumpled earth, kicking up chips of glazed roof tile, I didn't find it hard to imagine the halo cast up by Shangdu's fountains and shining constructions. Marco saw a bright marble palace and described an enormous collapsible building, where Kublai reportedly presided at three-day bacchanals. This one also must have shone, for it had roof tiles made from large pieces of bamboo, split in half and varnished. 

About the time the Polos arrived in Shangdu, Kublai was finishing his new capital 200 miles southeast at Daidu, in the central part of today's Beijing. Marco admired Daidu's streets "so straight and so broad," still the capital's layout. Homes were heated with "black stones ... which burn like logs." One version of Marco's book says that coal—unknown in most of Europe—was so plentiful that everyone had a hot bath three times a week. Daidu's population, said Marco, could be estimated from the number of prostitutes: 20,000. 

He was fascinated by the paper money issued by Kublai, for paper currency also was unknown in Europe. One day in a coin shop I held a sheet of Kublai's cash. It was about the size of a page of typing paper and had the slightly furry look of felt. Marco wrote, correctly, that the paper was made from the ground-up inner bark of mulberry trees. The note in my hand had the value of "two strings;' meaning 2,000 coins of a certain worth. "All these sheets are sealed with the seal of the great lord," Marco wrote, his only reference to Chinese printing. 

Kublai's palace buildings in Daidu gleamed like Shangdu's; their glazed roof tiles, "red and green and blue and yellow ... are bright like crystal, so that they shine very far." Two decades ago, when I first saw Beijing, it was one of the darkest capitals of the world. But in recent years the shining palace syndrome has run riot in tall buildings that proclaim China's vigorous economy. Windows tinted pink, blue, or green vie with walls of multicolored ceramic tiles, giving a Kublaiesque sheen to Beijing and other cities great and small. 

Daidu became the Polos' principal home until their departure for Venice in 1291. We don't know how Niccolò and Maffeo spent their time; some Chinese historians say they may have become merchants in companies in which Kublai or other officials invested. As for Marco, according to the book, Kublai employed him as a courier not only in China but to other Asian kingdoms. He employed thousands of foreigners, especially Persians and Arabs, as administrators. These se mu, or "colored eyes," ranked below Mongols in Kublai's dynasty, but above Chinese officials, who were not trusted. 

In the 19^th century, when it became possible for foreigners to travel freely in China, diplomats, missionaries, and adventurers tested Marco's presumed travel routes. They didn't always find him easy to follow, in part because he often called cities and other features by Persian or Mongol names. Thus Marco says he crossed a river named Caramoran. That was a corruption of Kara Muren, the Mongol name for the Huang Ho, or Yellow River. The great city of Xian appears in Marco's book as Quengianfu, a corruption of the Persian Kinjanfu. 

Marco spoke Persian and probably Mongol, but scholars conclude that he did not master Chinese and probably spent little time with people who spoke it. Some scholars have argued that he did not travel much in China—that he "borrowed" reports on faraway regions from officials or merchants. 

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I, too, sometimes doubted Marco, with reason. Several times he revives the old legend of Prester John, a mighty Christian ruler in Asia who never existed. Then there was Marco's mangonel story. When Kublai invaded the territory of the Southern Song dynasty, his army besieged the city of Xiangyang but met strong resistance. Marco says the Polos came to the army's aid by producing three mangonels, or catapults, that could hurl 300-pound stones, and with these the army forced the city's surrender. This tale overlooks two facts: The Mongols already knew how to make mangonels, and the surrender of Xiangyang took place two years before the Polos got to China. 

And anyone would look askance at some tales Marco recorded in Yunnan Province. Around the city of Dali, for example, was there really a giant snake with legs and a mouth "so large that it would well swallow a man"? I asked Shi Lizhuo, the editor of a local magazine, about that. "Marco heard the story from the local people," he answered. "According to legend there was a huge snake with legs here—a snake, not a crocodile—that ate people." 

Marco also claimed that people here dined on raw flesh, including that of fowl, sheep, oxen, and water buffalo, which they eat "as well as we do the cooked." Any doubts I may have had about that evaporated in a village near Dali where I watched a hundred persons sit down to feast on raw pork. 

The people were Bai, one of Yunnan's minorities, and they continued the tradition. "We eat this on special occasions" said the host, Li Ming. Li's son, Xiaole, was marrying his lifelong friend, Bizhu. So the Li family festooned their yard with pine garlands, invited the neighbors, and killed four hogs. 

Raw meat was "minced small," Marco wrote. Indeed the butchers at the Li home practically shaved it from the carcasses. Then, wrote Marco, "they put it in ... garlic sauce mixed with good spice." The Li family's sauce combined garlic, chilies, and soy. 

As the guests sat down, trumpeters and cymbalists played noisily to drive off any evil spirits that might be lurking. I wondered if they could drive off trichinosis. "The meat is clean," Li Ming assured me. "Early this morning we sent samples to the health clinic for testing." Inquiring no further, I took my place among the guests, fished out a pink morsel, dipped it in sauce, and ate. What, you ask, does raw pork taste like? Like garlic, chilies, and soy. 

Marco traveled the Southwestern Silk Road, as the Chinese now call the ancient route wiggling through mountainous southwestern Yunnan. To Americans it's famous as the Burma Road, the supply line for United States and Chinese forces fighting the Japanese in World War II. I left Dali on that route late of an afternoon in a hired van. For a while we paralleled the Mekong River—just a trickle of its future self—on new pavement. But as the road began to twist and climb, the pavement ran out, and we were rumbling over cobble, hand-laid in precise rows. Corn-ear pavement, the Chinese call it. 

Ahead, truck headlights spiraled from a mountainside of switchbacks. I imagined the trucks were GMCs and Internationals taking supplies to the Chinese Army in the dark days of the war, when Japanese forces were steadily advancing, and the Burma Road was China's only land lifeline. In truth, the trucks were Dong Fengs, or East Winds, China's workhorses. Heavily loaded, they groaned up-mountain and went down with brakes smoking. Sometimes in our headlights I saw a driver pouring water on his wheels to cool them off. 

Finally we were in the territory that Marco, using Persian, called Zardandan—"gold teeth," where the people "all have teeth of gold." He almost certainly was among another Yunnan minority, the Dai. I went looking for them, veering off the Burma Road on a thread of asphalt that slipped between plots of cabbage and sweet potatoes. Presently I was in the village of Xian Duo. Beside the stone walls of its houses, streams of water sparkled in the sun, giving equal pleasure to children and piglets. 

The first person I met was a woman in her 40s carrying two baskets of fertilizer on a shoulder pole. I asked if I might look into her mouth. Qian You-ai obligingly gave me a smile that revealed two gold incisors. "When I was about 18, people thought gold teeth were beautiful," she told me. "A dentist came to the village and took out two of my teeth and put these in. But it's not being done now—people don't think it's beautiful anymore." 

One version of Marco's book added that the gold-teeth people also decorated themselves with tattoos; using "five needles joined together ... they prick the flesh till the blood comes, and then they rub in a certain black coloring stuff." In Xian Duo I also asked about this, and in a few minutes several men good-naturedly stripped off their shirts to show me tattoos of tigers and elephants and adages in the curly Dai script. "Tattoos identify you as being Dai," explained a man named Wan. 

Marco's chapters on Yunnan also describe shamanistic healing practices, local religious customs, and the use of cowrie shells and salt as money, all of which have been verified by scholars. "He could not have written so many interesting things about Yunnan if he had not been here," declared Professor Fang Ling Gui, a retired historian from Yunnan Normal University in Kunming, the provincial capital. 

Marco probably spent most of his 17 years in China in eastern regions, where great cities throbbed with industry and commerce. These were the richest precincts of the world in the latter 13th century, and Marco describes them with wonderment: "There are very great merchants who do great trade ... they have silk beyond measure." For a pittance you could buy "the most beautiful vessels of porcelain, large and small." 

Many of these cities were strung along the Grand Canal, which stretched a thousand miles south from Daidu to Hangzhou. Marco journeyed along the canal, marveling at the variety of merchandise—silk, spices, salt, grain—carried in its vessels. Busier than ever, it is crowded today with barges that still carry silk and grain, and also cement and coal. 

At the old port of Guazhou, where the canal meets the Yangtze River, scores of barges waited to enter a lock to be lowered ten feet. A young woman stood at the prow of one, and when I called "Ni hao—hello," she put down a ladder. Shen and her husband, Gong, were en route to Suzhou to load 300 tons of coal. Their four-year-old son, Tang, hopped nimbly among the idled vessels, a small flash of orange in his life jacket. 

Gong joined us astern in the wheelhouse. Behind the wheel were sleeping pallets and a small television. A coal brazier blazed red, heating water in a kettle. A kitten was there too, tethered on a string. 

"My parents and Shen's parents were boat people," Gong told me. "But we went to school on land. When our son is older he will go to school on land too." Shen added, "He'll live with my parents. Both of us will keep working on the boat. We took out a big loan when we bought it, and we want to pay the bank as soon as we can." 

"We work for ourselves," Gong added, his voice booming with pride. "That's what's good about this life—you're free, you can do anything." The boat cost $24,400, a fortune in China. But many boat families do well, earning several thousand dollars a year. 

In Yangzhou people say Marco arrived via the canal and disembarked at the city's east gate. There is no gate now—it came down with the last of the city wall in the 1950s-but East Gate Road still links the canal to the downtown. Perhaps Marco walked that old thoroughfare at dusk, which is the time that I happened to be on it. Maybe he was attracted to the pots of noodles bubbling over braziers at curbside. Or to the knots of old men watching games of Chinese chess in pools of yellow light. 

Only a few old streets survive in Yangzhou, a modest city of 800,000 that shines with new buildings clad in the inevitable tile. In Marco's time it was the seat of a regional government with factories that turned out harness for Kublai Khan's army. 

Marco's book claims Kublai made Marco the boss of Yangzhou, that he ruled for three years. A 19th-century expert postulated that Marco couldn't have been older than 33, pretty young for a governor. Scholars believe Marco claimed to be more important than he was—that he was perhaps a minor official, if that. 

Professor Zhu Jiang, a Marco fan at Yangzhou University, disagrees. "Kublai needed administrators," he told me. "He had recently captured southern China, the Song dynasty territory. He didn't trust the Song officials, and there were not many Mongols for those jobs. So he was using 'colored eyes,' the foreigners." No Chinese record has been found that mentions Marco as an official, or that mentions him at all. "That doesn't prove anything," Professor Zhu said. "Many of the records of Kublai's dynasty were destroyed after the dynasty was overthrown."

Not Yangzhou but Hangzhou, farther south, was Marco's favorite city. Until Kublai's army captured Hangzhou in 1276, it had been the Song dynasty's opulent capital. In fact, Marco called it "Quinsai," a corruption of the Chinese word for capital—though, revealing his language handicap, he said Quinsai meant "city of Heaven:" Heavenly, yes indeed. It was "the best that is in the world," and Marco, one text says, visited Hangzhou "many times." Everything he wrote there proclaimed Hangzhou's wealth and pleasures. The "great quantity of rich palaces," for example, and the fine baths where "a hundred men or a hundred women can well bathe." 

To Hangzhou came ships from India, Persia, Java, and elsewhere, bringing spices, pearls, and jewels. "Foreigners stayed in this district, which is still known by some people as the foreigners' dock," said a longtime newspaperman, Wu Pengting. We were walking in a neighborhood of narrow lanes with laundry strung overhead, reaching across from balcony to balcony. 

Hangzhou is rapidly throwing up a dragon’s teeth skyline of a shining office and apartment buildings, so the days of this district are numbered. I felt fortunate to see, with Wu’s guidance, a small stream that may soon be erased. “It comes from the Grand Canal,” Wu said. “Marco probably took a boat on that stream from the canal to here.” Jewelry Lane parallels the stream, but its merchants today are sellers of bicycle parts and an elderly cobbler sitting amid piles of soles and taps. 

In the late 1280s, after some 15 years in China, the Polos could see trouble ahead. Their patron Kublai, in his 70s, was sliding into a gouty, alcoholic torpor. And Chinese resentment of the Mongol regime was growing. The Polos, meanwhile, had become "very rich in jewels of great value and in gold," says a version of Marco's text, presumably referring to profits from trade. It was time to go home. 

Alas, Marco wrote, Kublai was so fond of his Europeans that he wouldn't let them go, even though they "ask leave ... several times and pray him for it very sweetly." The Polos' fortunes changed after three emissaries arrived from Persia. The delegation came to procure a Mongol princess to be the wife of their ruler, Kublai's great-nephew Arghun. Kublai obliged with a girl of 17, named Kokejin. But the envoys could not escort her to Persia by land, some Polo texts say, for fighting had erupted in Mongol fiefdoms along the way. 

Marco, meanwhile, had just returned from a voyage to "Indie," meaning either India or the East Indies. Meeting him, the envoys concluded that his maritime knowledge was what they needed. They told Kublai that a sea voyage would be quicker and safer for the princess than travel by land and that they wanted the Polos to shepherd them. Kublai reluctantly acceded. 

Parts of that story were corroborated as recently as 1940 by the discovery in Chinese records of a document from 1290. It pertained to rations for persons going on a voyage with Arghun's emissaries, identified as Uludai, Abisqa, and Koje. The same names are in Marco's account. While the document does not mention the Polos, some scholars accept it as proof of Marco's presence in China. Otherwise, how could he have known the obscure tale of Arghun's envoys and Princess Kokejin?

Finally Kublai had 14 ships outfitted for the voyage. Six hundred persons crowded aboard, Marco said, plus sailors. Many were going abroad to buy exotic goods. The flotilla made up in the southern port of Quanzhou, which Marco called Zaiton. It was a glamorously cosmopolitan city, with Hindu temples, Christian churches, and mosques, for here, as to Hangzhou, came "all the ships from Indie" and other regions with their treasures. 

It is hard now at Quanzhou to imagine the tumult of 14 ships preparing to sail. The waterfront long ago silted up and the city's great trading era is done. 

Marco seemed to feel good about himself as he departed China. I haven't told you about all of it, he wrote, but I have told you well about parts, and about the people and the gold and jewels. That's not the end of the story, he added. "All the doings of the Indians ... many wonderful things" were still to come. And not only India lay ahead on his voyage home but also Sumatra and Sri Lanka. The homeward journey was going to be ghastly.