Nevertheless, although Marco Polo shows less knowledge of the Chinese
than one might expect from the extraordinary detail and fidelity of his
observation in other directions, he must have known many of these
charming and cultivated people, at Kinsai or Cambaluc, or at the city
which he governed. Among others, he must have known the great artist who
painted the roll mentioned above, Chao Mêng-fu, whom the Chinese called
'_Sung ksüeh Tao jen_' or the 'Apostle of Pine Trees and Snow'. He was a
lineal descendant of the founder of the Sung dynasty and a hereditary
official. When that dynasty at last fell before the Tartars, he and his
friend Ch'ien Hsüan, 'the Man of the Jade Pool and Roaring Torrent',
retired into private life. But in 1286 Chao Mêng-fu was summoned to
court by Kublai Khan, and, to the indignation of his friend, returned
and became secretary in the Board of War, occupying his time in this
post (what must Marco Polo have thought of him!) in painting his
marvellous pictures. He became a great favourite of the Khan and was
always about the court, and Marco Polo must have known him well and
perhaps have watched him at work painting those matchless landscapes,
and those pictures of horses and men for which he was famous. Marco
loved horses, as, indeed, he loved all kinds of sport (of which he had
plenty, for the Khan was a great hunter and hawker), and he has left a
word picture of the white brood mares at Shansi, which may be set beside
Chao Mêng-fu's brush picture of the 'Eight Horses in the Park of Kublai
Khan'.[24] He knew, too, perhaps Chao Mêng-fu's wife, the Lady Kuan, who
painted most exquisitely the graceful bamboo and the peony, so loved by
Chinese artists, and of whom it is related that 'she would watch the
moving shadows of the sprays thrown by the moon on the paper windows,
and transfer the fugitive outlines to paper with a few strokes of her
supple brush, so that every smallest scrap of her work was mounted in
albums as models for others to copy'.[25] Chao Mêng-fu and the Lady Kuan