IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| Cathay and the Way Thither : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
CCXViii PRELIMINARY ESSAY.
the benefit and advantage of all my gentle readers in few words and under various heads just as he set them down.
"The city of Campion.... The people here go dressed in cotton stuff of a black colour, which in winter the poor have lined with wolf-skins and sheep-skins, and the rich with costly sables and martens. They wear black caps coming to a point like sugar-loaves. The men are short rather than tall. They wear their beard as we do, and especially at a certain time of the year.
" Their houses are built after our fashion with brick and cut stone, two or three stories high, with ceilings painted in various colours and patterns. There are no end of painters there ; and one street in the city is entirely occupied by painters.
"The princes of that country to exhibit their pomp and grandeur have a great platform made, over which are stretched two canopies of silk embroidered with gold and silver, and with many pearls and other gems ; and on this they and their friends take their places, and forty or fifty slaves take up the whole and carry them about the city for recreation. Ordinary noblemen go about in a simple open litter without ornament carried by four to six men.
"Their temples are made after the fashion of our churches with columns from end to end ; and they are enormous things, fit to hold four or five thousand people. There are also in that city two remarkable statues, one of a man, the other of a woman, each of them forty feet in length and represented extended on the ground ;1 each figure is of one solid piece, and they are gilt all over. There are first-rate sculptors in stone there.
"They get their blocks of stone sometimes from a distance of two or three months' journey, conveying them on carts that have some forty very high wheels with iron tires ; and these shall be drawn by five or six hundred horses or mules.
"There are other statues of smaller size that have six or seven heads and ten hands, each hand grasping a different article, as if (for example) one should hold a serpent, a second a bird, a third a flower, and so on.
" They have also certain monasteries where many men dwell leading the most holy life possible. For they have the doors of their chambers walled up so they can never get forth again as long as they live. People come every day with food for them.
"There are also no end of the same class who go about the town just like our friars.
" Their custom is, when anyone of their kin shall die, to wear white clothes for many days, that is to say of cotton cloth. Their clothes are made after the same fashion as ours, reaching to the ground, and with
large sleeves like those of ours at Venice which we call a gomedo.2 1 See preceding note, p. cciii.
Utrisque (vins et feminis) manicœ laxiores longioresque communes sunt, quales in Italia Venetorum esse soient" (Trigautius, b. i, c. 8).
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