bamboo pavilion swung like a tent from two hundred silken cords, its
stud of white mares, and its wonder-working magicians. Indeed his
description of the summer palace is better known to Englishmen than any
other part of his work, for Shandu is Xanadu, which Coleridge saw in a
dream after he had been reading Marco's book and wove into
wonderful verse:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree,
Where Alph the sacred river ran,
Past caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense bearing tree,
And here were forests, ancient as the hills
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

Nor is it only palaces which Marco Polo describes, for he tells of the
great canal and inland river trade of China, the exports and imports at
its harbours, the paper money, the system of posts and caravanserais,
which linked it together. He gives an unsurpassed picture of that huge,
rich, peaceful empire, full of wealth and commerce and learned men and
beautiful things, and of its ruler Kublai Khan, one of the noblest
monarchs who ever sat upon a throne, who, since 'China is a sea that
salts all the rivers that flow into it,'[21] was far more than a
barbarous Mongol khan, was in very truth a Chinese emperor, whose house,
called by the Chinese the 'Yuan Dynasty', takes its place among the
great dynasties of China.