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| Notes on Marco Polo : vol.1 |
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Citation Information
362 158. CINGHIS
past. Of himself he said that through the kalpa (= the ages of the world) he remembered his former lives, and that he had personally seen the dark abode built up on the empty green slope. When the witch came, leading the ' horse of the soul ' (cf. p. 332), the holy monk, crossing the Moving Sands (Liu-sha), had already arrived. » [Note of the author : The name of the monk was ï; jj jig! Ch'ao-êrh-chi.] The rest of the poem is devoted to the earthquakes and tempests which raged whenever some one trespassed on the burial precincts. I need only remark here that, after a line on the apparition of corporal relics (shê-li > sarira) of the late Emperors, Hsü Lan adds in a note that « many sarira were obtained at the cremation of the Yüan ancestors ( -it lid Yüan tsu) » ; but his informant the Tibetan monk, who remembered the things of so many kalpa, had evidently forgotten that cremation was not resorted to by the Emperors of the Yüan dynasty !
The statements of CHANG P'êng-ho and of Hsü Lan have already been contradicted by CHANG
Mu (6, 10 a, where CHANG P'êng-ho's diary is quoted under the erroneous title of 4 El nL
Mo-pei jih-chi, « Diary [kept] north of the Desert »). HUNG Chün (1 B, 46) added that an
inspection of the map sufficed to establish that the region of Kuei-hua-ch'êng could not be the place where Chinghiz-khan was buried, and that we had perhaps to do here with the tombs of some of the Chinghiz-khanids who, according to Raidu-'d-Din, had been buried in other places; T'u Chi (3, 34 a) concurs with HUNG Chün.
I see things in a somewhat different light. I have not succeeded in tracing the name of a irß Ch'i-lien Mountain north of Kuei-hua-ch'êng apart from the works of CHANG P'êng-ho and of Hsü Lan. The Chung-kuo ti-ming to tz'u-tien 1 (p. 528) mentions only one Ch'i-lien Mountain, the famous westerly one of Han and T'ang times. The Ta-Ch'ing i-t'ung chih, 124, 1 b, states
that 20 li north of Kuei-hua-ch'êng is the ïlt ,: Wêng-kung-ku (« Valley of Master Wêng »)
and 35 li north of the same city the Wêng-kung-shan (« Mountain of Master Wêng »), adding that it is part of the j l[J Yin-shan which begins north of the great bend of the Huang-ho, and that it
is known under many local names. I take it for almost evident that LU Ch'i-lien-shan is
one of these local names, and that it has not been invented independently by both CHANG P'êngho and Hsü Lan. But if we discard the boasts of the Tibetan monk, this local name itself provides us with a most plausible solution. Though written with different characters, it is the phonetic similitude of the two Ch'i-lien which must have given rise to the local tradition according to which the Ch'i-lien-shan north of Kuei-hua-ch'êng was believed to be the Ch'i-lien Valley where the Mongol Emperors had been buried. There is no reason to suppose, as HUNG Chün did, that there may have been somewhat north of Kuei-hua-ch'êng the burial-ground of any Chinghiz-khanid at all.
VIII. — I have no access at present to the { ,i A fit Hou ch'u-sai lou, « Memoirs of a second journey beyond the Barrier », by It j^ KUNG Chih-yo (the preface is dated ping-ch'ên, probably 1736), in which the Ch'i-lien Valley of the Mongols is said to be in the district of Fangshan (about 40 kilometres south-west of Peking). CHANG Mu, who opposes it (6, 10 a), says that it is the result of a confusion with the sacrifices offered to the manes of the Mongol Emperors in the department of Shun-t'ien-fu (-= Peking, to which Fang-shan belongs). I have no doubt that
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