“The great bulk of the revenue of the cities, which enters the exchequer of the Great Kaan, is expended in maintaining these garrisons.  And if perchance any city rebel (as you often find that under a kind of madness or intoxication they rise and murder their governors), as soon as it is known, the adjoining cities despatch such large forces from their garrisons that the rebellion is entirely crushed.  For it would be too long an affair if troops from Cathay had to be waited for, involving perhaps a delay of two months.”

NOTE 12.—­“The sons of the dead, wearing hempen clothes as badges of mourning, kneel down,” etc. (Doolittle, p. 138.)

NOTE 13.—­These practices have been noticed, supra, Bk.  I. ch. xl.

NOTE 14.—­This custom has come down to modern times.  In Pauthier’s Chine Moderne, we find extracts from the statutes of the reigning dynasty and the comments thereon, of which a passage runs thus:  “To determine the exact population of each province the governor and the lieutenant-governor cause certain persons who are nominated as Pao-kia, or Tithing-Men, in all the places under their jurisdiction, to add up the figures inscribed on the wooden tickets attached to the doors of houses, and exhibiting the number of the inmates” (p. 167).

Friar Odoric calls the number of fires 89 tomans; but says 10 or 12 households would unite to have one fire only!

[1] In the first edition, my best authority on this matter was a lecture
    on the city by the late Rev. D.D.  Green, an American Missionary at
    Ningpo, which is printed in the November and December numbers for 1869
    of the (Fuchau) Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal.  In the
    present (second) edition I have on this, and other points embraced in
    this and the following chapters, benefited largely by the remarks of
    the Right Rev. G.E.  Moule of the Ch.  Mission.  Soc., now residing at
    Hang-chau.  These are partly contained in a paper (Notes on Colonel
    Yule’s Edition of Marco Polo’s ’Quinsay’) read before the North China
    Branch of the R.A.Soc. at Shang-hai in December 1873 [published in New
    Series, No.  IX. of the Journal N.C.B.R.A.Soc.], of which a proof has
    been most kindly sent to me by Mr. Moule, and partly in a special
    communication, both forwarded through Mr. A. Wylie. [See also Notes
    on Hangchow Past and Present, a paper read in 1889 by Bishop G.E. 
    Moule at a Meeting of the Hangchau Missionary Association, at whose
    request it was compiled, and subsequently printed for private
    circulation.—­H.C.]

[2] The building of the present Luh-ho-ta ("Six Harmonies Tower"), after
    repeated destructions by fire, is recorded on a fine tablet of the
    Sung period, still standing (Moule).

CHAPTER LXXVII.