National Institute of Informatics - Digital Silk Road Project
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books

50   MARCO POLO.   VOL. I. BK. I.

and pipes, which disturb ears through the night : these are

produced by multifarious noises coming from the cracking ice."

Kumagusu Minakata has another note on remarkable sounds

in Japan in Nature, LIV., May 28, 1896, p. 78.

Sir T. Douglas Forsyth, Buried Cities in the Shifting Sands

of the Great Desert of Gobi, Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc., Nov. 13, 1876,

says, p. 29 : " The stories told by Marco Polo, in his 39th chapter,

about shifting sands and strange noises and demons, have been

repeated by other travellers down to the present time. Colonel

Prjevalsky, in pp. 193 and 194 of his interesting Travels, gives

his testimony to the superstitions of the Desert ; and I find, on

reference to my diary, that the same stories were recounted to

me in Kashghar, and I shall be able to show that there is some

truth in the report of treasures being exposed to view."

P. 201, Line i 2. Read the Governor of Urumtsi founded instead

of found.

XL., p. 203. Marco Polo comes to a city called Sachiu belonging

to a province called Tangut. " The people are for the most part

Idolaters. . . . The Idolaters have a peculiar language, and are no

traders, but live by their agriculture. They have a great many abbeys

and minsters full of idols of sundry fashions, to which they pay great

honour and reverence, worshipping them and sacrificing to them with

much ado."

i

Sachiu, or rather Tun Hwang, is celebrated for its " Caves

of Thousand Buddhas " ; Sir Aurel Stein wrote the following

remarks in his Ruins of Desert Cathay, II., p. 27 : " Surely it was

the sight of these colossal images, some reaching nearly a hundred

feet in height, and the vivid first impressions retained of the cult

paid to them, which had made Marco Polo put into his chapter on

` Sachiu,' i.e. Tun-huang, a long account of the strange idolatrous

customs of the people of Tangut. . . . Tun-huang manifestly

had managed to retain its traditions of Buddhist piety down

to Marco's days. Yet there was plentiful antiquarian evidence

showing that most of the shrines and art remains at the Halls

of the Thousand Buddhas dated back to the period of the T'ang

Dynasty, when Buddhism flourished greatly in China. Tun-

huang, as the westernmost outpost of China proper, had then

for nearly two centuries enjoyed imperial protection both against

the Turks in the north and the Tibetans southward. But during

the succeeding period, until the advent of paramount Mongol

power, some two generations before Marco Polo's visit, these

marches had been exposed to barbarian inroads of all sorts.