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44   MARCO POLO.   VOL. I. BK. I.

morals, which seems always to have distinguished the people of

the Khotan region, escape Marco Polo's attention. For of the

Province of Pein,' which, as we shall see, represents the oases of

the adjoining modern district of Keriya, he relates the custom

that ` if the husband of any woman go away upon a journey and

remain away for more than twenty days, as soon as that term is

past the woman may marry another man, and the husband also

may then marry whom he pleases.'

" No one who has visited Khotan or who is familiar with the

modern accounts of the territory, can read the early notices above

extracted without being struck at once by the fidelity with which

they reflect characteristic features of the people at the present

day. Nor is it necessary to emphasize the industrial pre-eminence

which Khotan still enjoys in a variety of manufactures through

the technical skill and inherited training of the bulk of its

population."

Sir Aurel Stein further remarks (Ancient Khotan, I., p. 183) :

" When Marco Polo visited Khotan on his way to China, between

the years 1271 and 1275, the people of the oasis were flourishing,

as the Venetian's previously quoted account shows. His descrip-

tion of the territories further east, Pein, Cherchen, and Lop,

which he passed through before crossing ` the Great Desert ' to

Sha-chou, leaves no doubt that the route from Khotan into Kan-

su was in his time a regular caravan road. Marco Polo found

the people of Khotan ` all worshippers of Mahommet ' and the

territory subject to the ` Great Kaan,' i.e. Kúblái, whom by

that time almost the whole of the Middle Kingdom acknowledged

as emperor. While the neighbouring Yarkand owed allegiance

to Kaidu, the ruler of the Chagatai dominion, Khotan had thus

once more renewed its old historical connexion with China."

XXVI., p. 19o.

" A note of Yule's on p. 190 of Vol. I. describes

Johnson's report on the people of Khoten (1 865) as having ` a

slightly Tartar cast of countenance.' The Toba History makes

the same remark 1300 years earlier : ` From Kao-ch'ang (Turfan)

westwards the people of the various countries have deep eyes and

high noses ; the features in only this one country (Khoten) are

not very Hu (Persian, etc.), but rather like Chinese.' I published

a tolerably complete digest of Lob Nor and Khoten early history

from Chinese sources, in the Anglo-Russian Society's Journal for

Jan. and April, 1903. It appears to me that the ancient capital

Yotkhan, discovered thirty-five years ago, and visited in 1891 by