IIIF Color HighRes
National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
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| IIIF Color HighRes |
| The Book of Ser Marco Polo : vol.2 |
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Citation Information
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| 88 MARCO POLO BOOK II. | • | ||||
| Mlt | spirit, and that he is propitiated, and they fall to eating and drinking with great joy and mirth, and he who had been lying lifeless on the ground gets up and takes his share. So when they have all eaten and drunken; every man departs home. And presently the sick man gets sound and well." Now that I have told you of the customs and naughty ways of that people, we will have done talking naughty them and their province, and I will tell you about others, all in regular order and succession. | |||||
| NOTE r.—[Baber writes (Travels, p. 171) when arriving to the Lan-tsang kiang (Mekong River) : " We were now on the borderline between Carajan and Zardandan : When you have travelled five days you find a province called Zardandan,' says Messer Marco, precisely the actual number of stages from Tali-fu to the present boundary of Yung-ch'ang. That this river must have been the demarcation NOTE 2.—Ramusio says that both men and women use this gold case. There can be no better instance of the accuracy with which Polo is generally found to have represented Oriental names, when we recover his real representation of them, than this name Zardandan. In the old Latin editions the name appeared as Ardandan, Arcladam, etc. ; in Ramusio as Cardandan, correctly enough, only the first letter should have been printed Ç. Marsden, carrying out his systematic conversion of the Ramusian spelling, made this into Kardandan, and thus the name became irrecognizable. Klaproth, I believe, first showed that the word was simply the Persian ZAR-DANDAN, " Gold-Teeth," and produced quotations from Rashiduddin mentioning the people in question by that identical name. Indeed that historian mentions them several times. Thus : " North-west of China is the frontier of Tibet, and of the ZARDANDAN, who lie between Tibet and Karájáng. These people cover their teeth with a gold case, which they take off when they eat." They are also frequently mentioned in the Chinese annals about this period under the same name, viz. Kin-Chi, " Gold-Teeth," and some years after Polo's departure from the East they originated a revolt against the Mongol yoke, in which a great number of the imperial troops were massacred. (De Mailla, IX. 478-479.) | ||||||
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