That farm boy I earlier spoke of, whose initiative and assiduity I found admirable, forfeited some of my regard as we talked further and he told me, by way of my scribe:
“My passion for reading and my yearning for learning might distress my aged parents. They might decry my ambition as an overweening arrogance, but—”
“Why on earth should they?”
“We follow the Precepts of Kong Fu-tze, and one of his teachings was that a low-born person should not presume above his ordained station in life. But I was about to say that my parents do
not
object, for my reading affords me opportunity also to manifest my filial piety, and another of the Precepts is that parents be honored above all else. So, since each night I am so eager to get to my books and my glowworms, I am the first of us to retire. I can lie on my pallet and force myself to lie perfectly still while I read, so that all the mosquitoes in the house can freely suck my blood.”
I blinked and said, “I do not understand.”
“By the time my aged parents stretch their old bodies on their pallets, you see, the mosquitoes are gorged and sated, and do not molest them. Yes, my parents often boast of me to our neighbors, and I am held an example to all sons.”
I said unbelievingly, “This is something marvelous. The old fools boast of you letting yourself be eaten alive, but not of your striving to better yourself?”
“Well, doing the one is being obedient to the Precepts, while the other … .”
I said, “Vakh!” and turned and went away from him. A parent too apathetic to swat his own mosquitoes seemed not much worth honoring, or humoring with attention—or preserving, for that matter. As a Christian, I believe in devotion to one’s father and mother, but I think that not even the Commandment enjoins abject filiality to the exclusion of everything else. If that were so, no son would ever have time or opportunity to produce a son to honor
him.
That Kong Fu-tze, or Kong-the-Master, of whom the boy had spoken, was a long-ago Han philosopher, the originator of one of the three chief religions of those people. The three faiths all were fragmented into numerous contradictory and antagonistic sects, and all three were much intermingled in popular observance, and they were interlarded with traces of ever so many lesser cults—worship of gods and goddesses, demons and demonesses, nature spirits, ancient superstitions —but in the main there were three: Buddhism, the Tao and the Precepts of Kong Fu-tze.
I have already mentioned Buddhism, holding out to man a salvation from the rigors of this world by means of continual rebirths ascending to the nothingness of Nirvana. I have also mentioned the Tao, the Way by which a man could hope to harmonize and live happily with all the good things of the world around him. The Precepts dealt less with the here or the hereafter than with all-that-has-gone-before. To put it simplistically, a practitioner of Buddhism looked to the empty void of the future. A follower of the Tao did his best to enjoy the teeming and eventful present. But a devotee of the Precepts was concerned mostly with the past, the old, the dead.
Kong Fu-tze preached respect for tradition, and tradition is what his Precepts became. He ordained that younger brothers must revere the older, and a wife revere her husband, and all revere the parents, and they the community elders, and so on. The result was that the greatest honor accrued not to the best, but to the oldest. A man who had heroically prevailed against fierce odds—to win some notable victory or attain to some notable eminence—was accounted less worthy than some human turnip who had merely sat inert and
existed
and survived to a venerable age. All the respect rightly owed to excellence was bestowed upon vegetable antiquity. I did not think that reasonable. I had known enough old fools—and not just in Manzi—to know that age does not, as a matter of inevitability, confer wisdom, dignity, authority or worth. Years do not do that by themselves; the years must have contained experience and learning and achievement and travail overcome; and most people’s years do not.
Worse yet. If a living grandfather was to be venerated, well,
his
father and grandfather, though dead and gone, were even older—no xe vero?—and even more highly to be venerated. Or so the Precepts were interpreted by their devotees, and those Precepts had permeated the consciousness of all the Han, including those who professed faith in Buddhism or the Tao or the Mongols’ Tengri or the Nestorian version of Christianity or some one of the lesser religions. There was a general attitude of “Who knows? It may not help, but it does no harm, to burn a bit of incense to the next fellow’s deity, however absurd.” Even the most nearly rational persons, those Han who had converted to Nestorian Christianity—who would never have made ko-tou to the next fellow’s absurd fat idol, or a shaman’s divining bones, or a Taoist’s advice-giving sticks, or whatever—saw no harm, and possible benefit, in making ko-tou to his own ancestors. A man may be poor in all material assets, but even the most impoverished wretch has whole nations of ancestors. Paying the requisite reverence to all of them kept every living person of the Han perpetually prone—if not in physical fact, certainly in his outlook on life.
The Han word mian-tzu meant literally “face,” the face on the front of one’s head. But, because the Han seldom let their faces show much surface expression of their feelings, the word had come to mean the feelings going on
behind
those faces. To insult a man or humiliate him or best him in a contest was to cause him to “lose face.” And the vulnerability of his feeling-face persisted beyond the grave, into uttermost eternity. If a son dared not behave in any way to shame or sadden the feeling-faces of his living elders, how much more reprehensible it would have been to hurt the disembodied feeling-faces of the dead. So all the Han ordered their lives as if they were being watched and scrutinized and judged by all their forebear generations. It might have been a worthwhile superstition, if it had spurred all men to attempt feats that their ancestors would applaud. But it did not. It made them only anxious to evade their ancestors’ disapproval. A life entirely devoted to the avoidance of wrong seldom achieves anything exceptionally right—or anything at all.
Vakh.
THE city named Su-zho, through which we passed on our way south, was a lovely city, and we were almost loath to leave it. But when we reached our destination, Hang-zho, we found it an even more beautiful and gracious place. There is a rhyming adage which is known even to faraway Han who have never visited either of the cities:
Shang ye Tian tang,
Zhe ye Su, Hang!
Which could be translated thus:
Heaven is far from me and you,
But here for us are Hang and Su!
As I have said, Hang-zho was like Venice in one respect, being girt all about by water and riddled by waterways. It was both a riverside and a seaside city, but not a port city. It was situated on the north bank of a river called the Fu-chun, which here widened and shallowed and fanned out, eastward of the city, into many separate runnels across a vast, spreading, flat delta of sand and pebbles. That empty delta extended for some two hundred li, from Hang-zho to what was, most of the time, the distant edge of the Sea of Kithai. (I will shortly make plain what I mean by “most of the time.”) Since no seaborne vessels could cross that immense sandy shoal, Hang-zho had no port facilities, except what docks were necessary to handle the comparatively few and small boats that plied the river inland from the city.
All the many main avenues of Hang-zho were canals running from the riverside into the city and through it and round about it. At places those canals broadened out into wide, serene, mirror-smooth lakes, and in those were islands that were public parks, all flowers and birds and pavilions and banners. The lesser streets of the city were neatly cobbled, and they were broad but tortuous and twisty, and they humped themselves over the canals on ornate, high-arched bridges, more of them than I could ever count. At every bend in every street or canal, one had a view of one of the city’s many high and elaborate gates, or a tumultuous marketplace, or a palatial building or temple, as many as ten or twelve stories high, with the distinctive curly Han eaves projecting from every single story.
The Court Architect of Khanbalik had once told me that Han cities never had straight streets because the Han commonfolk foolishly believed that demons could travel only in straight lines, and foolishly believed that they were thwarting the demons by putting kinks in all their streets. But that was nonsense. In truth, the streets of any Han city—including both the paved and the watery ones of Hang-zho—were laid out in deliberate emulation of the Han style of writing. The city’s marketplace—or each of the marketplaces, in a city like Hang-zho that had so many—was a straight-edged square, but all the surrounding streets would have bends and curves and sinuosities, gentle or abrupt, just as do the brush strokes of a written Han word. My own personal yin signature could very well be the street plan of some walled Han town.
Hang-zho was, as befits a capital city, very civilized and refined, and it exhibited many touches of good taste. At intervals along every street were tall vases in which the householders or shopkeepers put flowers for the delight of the passersby. At this season they were all brimming with glowing, dazzling chrysanthemums. That flower, incidentally, was the national symbol of Manzi, reproduced on all official signboards and documents and such, revered because the exuberant florets of its blossom are so reminiscent of the sun and its sunbeams. Also at intervals along the streets were posts bearing boxes labeled—so my scribe told me—“Receptacle for the respectful deposit of sacred paper.” That meant, he told me, any piece of paper with writing on it. Ordinary litter was simply swept up and removed, but the written word was held in such high regard that all such papers were taken to a special temple and ritually burned.
But Hang-zho also was, as befits a prosperous trading city, rather gaudily voluptuous in other respects. It seemed that every last person on the streets, except for travel-dusted new arrivals like us, was luxuriously garbed in silks and velvets, and jingling with jewelry. Although admirers of Hang-zho called the city a Heaven on earth, people in other cities enviously called it “the Melting-Pot of Money.” I also saw on the streets, in full daylight, numbers of the sauntering young women-for-hire whom the Han called “wild flowers.” And there were many open-fronted little wine shops and cha shops—with names like the Pure Delight and the Fount of Refreshment and the Garden of Djennet (that one patronized by Muslim residents and visitors)—some of which shops, said my scribe, actually dispensed wine and cha, but all of which mainly traded in wild flowers.
The names of Hang-zho’s streets and landmarks, I suppose, ranked somewhere between the tasteful and the voluptuous. Many of them were nicely poetic: one park island was called the Pavilion from Which the Herons Take Flight at Dawn. Some names seemed to record some local legends: one temple was the Holy House That Was Borne Here Through the Sky. Some were tersely descriptive: a canal known as Ink to Drink was not inky, but clear and clean; it was lined with schoolhouses, and when a Han spoke of drinking ink, he was referring to scholastic study. Some names were more lavishly descriptive: the Lane of Flowers Worked with Colorful Birds’ Feathers was a short street of shops where hats were made. And some names were simply unwieldy: the main road going from the city inland was labeled the Paved Avenue Which Winds a Long Way Between Gigantic Trees, Among Streams Falling in Cascades, and Upward at Last to an Ancient Buddhist Temple on a Hilltop.
Hang-zho was again like Venice in not allowing large animals into the center of the city. In Venice, a rider coming from Mestre on the mainland must tether his horse in a campo on the northwest side of the island, and go by gòndola the rest of the way. We, arriving at Hang-zho, left our mounts and pack asses at a karwansarai on the outskirts, and went leisurely on foot—the better to examine the place—through the streets and over the many bridges, our slaves carrying our necessary luggage. When we came to the Wang’s immense palace, we even had to leave our boots and shoes outside. The steward who met us at the main portal advised us that that was the Han custom, and gave us soft slippers to wear indoors.
The recently appointed Wang of Hang-zho was another of Kubilai’s sons, Agayachi, a little older than myself. He had been informed by an advance rider of our approach, and he greeted me most warmly, “Sain bina, sain urkek,” and Hui-sheng too, addressing her respectfully as “sain nai.” When she and I had bathed and changed into presentable attire, and sat down with Agayachi to a welcoming banquet, he seated me on his right and Hui-sheng at his left, not at a separate women’s table. Few people had given much notice to Hui-sheng in the days when she had been a slave, because, although she had been then no less comely, and had dressed as well as all court slaves were made to do, she had cultivated the slave’s demeanor of unobtrusiveness. Now, as my consort, she dressed as richly as any noblewoman, but it was her letting her radiant personality shine forth that made people notice her—and approvingly, and admiringly.
The table fare of Manzi was opulent and delicious, but somewhat different to what was popular in Kithai. The Han, for some reason, did not care for milk and milk products, of which their neighbor Mongols and Bho were so fond. So we had no butter or cheeses or kumis or arkhi, but there were enough novelties to make up for the lack. When the servants loaded my plate with something called Mao-tai Chicken, I expected to get drunk from it, but it was not spirituous, only delightfully delicate. The dining hall steward told me that the chicken was not cooked in that potent liquor, but killed with it. Giving a chicken a drink of mao-tai, he said, made it as limp as it would make a man, relaxing all its muscles, letting it die in bliss, so it cooked most tenderly.
There was a tart and briny dish of cabbage, shredded and fermented to softness, which I praised—and got myself laughed at—my table companions informing me that it was really a peasant food, and had first been concocted, ages ago, as a cheap and easily portable provender for the laborers who built the Great Wall. But another dish with a genuinely peasant-sounding name, Beggar’s Rice, was not likely ever to have been available to many peasants. It got the name, said the steward, because it had originated as a mere tossing together of kitchen scraps and oddments. However, at this palace table, it was like the most rich and various risotto that ever was. The rice was but a matrix for every kind of shellfish, and bits of pork and beef, and herbs and bean sprouts and zhu-gan shoots and other vegetable morsels, and the whole tinted yellow—with gardenia petals, not with zafràn; our Compagnia had not yet started selling in Manzi.
There were crisp, crunchy Spring Rolls of egg batter filled with steamed clover sprigs, and the little golden zu-jin fish fried whole and eaten in one bite, and the mian pasta prepared in various ways, and sweet cubes of chilled pea paste. The table also was laden with salvers of delicacies peculiar to the locality, and I took at least a taste of all of them—tasting first and then inquiring their identity, lest their names make me reluctant. They included ducks’ tongues in honey, cubes of snake and monkey meat in savory gravy, smoked sea slugs, pigeon eggs cooked with what looked like a sort of silvery pasta, which was really the tendons from the fins of sharks. For sweets, there were big, fragrant quinces, and golden pears the size of rukh’s eggs, and the incomparable hami melons, and a soft-frozen, fluffy confection made, said the steward, of “snow bubbles and apricot blossoms.” For drink there was amber-colored kao-liang wine, and rose wine the exact color of Hui-sheng’s lips, and Manzi’s most prized variety of cha, which was called Precious Thunder Cha.
After we had concluded the meal with the soup, a clear broth made from date plums, and after the soup cook had emerged from the kitchen for us all to applaud him, we repaired to another hall to discuss my business here. We were a group of a dozen or so, the Wang and his staff of lesser ministers, all of whom were Han, but only a few of them locals retained from the Sung administration; most had come from Kithai and so could converse in Mongol. All of them, including Agayachi, wore the floor-sweeping, straight-lined but elegantly embroidered Han robes, with ample sleeves for tucking the hands in and carrying things in. The first order of business was the Wang’s remarking to me that I was at liberty to wear any costume I pleased—I was then wearing, and had long been partial to, the Persian garb of neat tulband and blouse with tight sleeve cuffs, and a cape for outdoors—but he suggested that, for official meetings, I ought to replace the tulband with the Han hat, as worn by himself and his ministers.
That was a shallow, cylindrical thing like a pillbox, with a button on its top, and the button was the only indication of rank among all those in the room. There were, I learned, nine ranks of ministers, but all were dressed so finely and looked so distinguished that only by the discreet insignia of the buttons could they be told apart. Agayachi’s hat button was a single ruby. It was big enough to have been worth a fortune, and it betokened his being of the very highest rank possible here, a Wang, but it was much less conspicuous than, say, Kubilai’s gleaming gold morion or a Venetian Doge’s scufieta. I was entitled to a hat with a coral button, indicating the next-most rank, a Kuan, and Agayachi had such a hat all ready to present to me. The other ministers variously wore the buttons of descending rank: sapphire, turquoise, crystal, white shell, and so on, but it would be a while before I learned to sort them out at a glance. I unwound my tulband and perched the pillbox on my head, and all said I looked the very picture of a Kuan, all but one aged Han gentleman, who grumbled:
“You ought to be more fat.”
I asked why. Agayachi laughed and said:
“It is a Manzi belief that babies, dogs and government officials ought to be fat, or else they are assumed to be ill-tempered. But never mind, Marco. A fat official is assumed to be filching from the treasury and taking bribes. Any government official—fat, thin, ugly or handsome —is always an object of revilement.”
But the same old man grumbled, “Also, Kuan Polo, you ought to dye your hair black.”
Again I asked why, for his own hair was a dusty gray. He said:
“All Manzi loathes and fears the kwei—the evil demons—and all Manzi believes the kwei to have reddish fair hair, like yours.”
The Wang laughed again. “It is we Mongols who are to blame for that. My great-grandfather Chinghiz had an orlok named Subatai. He did many depredations in this part of the world, so he was the Mongol general most hated by the Han, and he had reddish fair hair. I do not know what the kwei were supposed to look like in earlier times, but ever since Subatai’s day, they have looked like
him.”
Another man chuckled and said, “Keep your kwei hair and beard, Kuan Polo. Considering what you are here to do, it may
help
if you are feared and hated.” He spoke Mongol well enough, but it was obviously a newly acquired language for him. “As the Wang has remarked, all government officials are reviled. You can imagine that, of all officials, tax collectors are the most detested. And I hope you can imagine how a
foreign
tax collector, collecting for a conqueror government, is going to be regarded. I propose that we spread the word that you really
are
a kwei demon.”
I gave him a look of amusement. He was a plump, pleasant-faced Han of middle age, and he wore a wrought-gold button on his hat, identifying him as being of the seventh rank.