The Successors of Genghis Khan - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian ...

THE SUCCESSORS OF GENGHIS KHAN
The land of Khitai is an exceedingly broad and vast country and
very thickly populated. Reliable authorities declare that in the whole
of the inhabitable quarter there is in no other country such populousness
or multitude of people as here. A gulf103 of the Ocean-Sea, not
very large, goes out from the southeast on the borders and coasts
between Manzi and Goli104 and comes into the middle of Khitai
up to 4105 parasangs from Khan-Baliq, to which people come by ship.
Because of the proximity of the sea there is a heavy rainfall, and some
of those provinces have a hot and some a cold climate. During his
reign, Chingiz-Khan conquered the greater part of those countries
and they were all of them taken during the reign of Ogetei Qa'an.
Chingiz-Khan and his sons had no capital in Khitai, as has been
mentioned in every history, but because Mongke Qa'an had given
that kingdom to Qubilai Qa'an, and he with a farsighted view had
seen in it an exceedingly prosperous kingdom with many important
provinces and countries adjacent to it, he had chosen it [as the site of]
his capital. He established his summer residence in the town of Khan-
Bal'iq, which in Khitayan is called Jungdu106 and which had been one
of the capitals of the rulers of Khitai. It was built in ancient times under
the direction of astrologers and learned men with a very auspicious
horoscope and had always been regarded as extremely fortunate
and prosperous. As it had been destroyed by Chingiz-Khan, Qubilai
Qa'an wished to rebuild it, and for his own fame and renown he
built another town called Daidu107 alongside it so that they adjoin
each other. The wall of the town has seventeen towers and there is a
distance of i parasang from tower to tower. So populous is the town
that buildings without number have been constructed outside [the
walls].
All sorts of fruit trees have been brought from every land and planted
in the gardens and orchards there; and most of them bear fruit. And in
the middle of the town he has built as his ordo an exceedingly large
palace to which he has given the name of Qarshi. The pillars and
>°3 The Po Hai.
ia> Chinese Kao-li, Korea.
105 Klaproth (Cathay, p. 113, note 2) supposes that the text must originally have had
twenty-four, the real distance between Peking and the coast of the gulf.
106 See above, p. 227 and note 121.
107 Polo's Taidu, Chinese Ta-tu, "Great Capital," on which see Polo II, pp. 843-45.
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