with charming names: 'Lake Prospect', 'Bamboo Chambers', 'The
House of the Eight Genii', and 'Pure Delight'. Here, like the
Venetians, the men of Kinsai came for pleasure parties in
barges, nobly hung and furnished, the cabins painted with
flowers and mountain landscapes, and looking out they saw on
one side the whole expanse of the city, its palaces, temples,
convents, and gardens, and on the other the stretch of clear
water, crowded with coloured pleasure boats, over which came
echoing the high, clear voices and the tinkling instruments
of the revellers. There is no space in which to tell of the
King's palace, with its gardens and orchards, its painted
pavilions, and the groves where the palace ladies coursed the
game with dogs, and, tired of the pastime, flung off their
robes and ran to the lake, where they disported themselves
like a shoal of silver fishes. But a word must be said of the
junks, which came sailing into the harbour four and twenty
miles away, and up the river to the city; and of the great
concourse of ships which came to Zaiton (perhaps the modern
Amoy), the port of the province. Here every year came a
hundred times more pepper than came to the whole of
Christendom through the Levantine ports. Here from Indo China
and the Indies came spices and aloes and sandalwood, nutmegs,
spikenard and ebony, and riches beyond mention. Big junks
laded these things, together with musk from Tibet, and bales
of silk from all the cities of Mansi[C], and sailed away in
and out of the East India Archipelago, with its spice-laden
breezes billowing their sails, to Ceylon. There merchants
from Malabar and the great trading cities of southern India
took aboard their cargoes and sold them in turn to Arab
merchants, who in their turn sold them to the Venetians in