FYTCHE, Chief Commissioner of British Burma; to DR. ROST and DR. FORBES-WATSON, of the India Office Library and Museum; to Mr. R. H. MAJOR, and Mr. R. K. DOUGLAS, of the British Museum; to Mr. N. B. DENNYS, of Hong-kong; and to Mr. C. GARDNER, of the Consular Establishment in China.  There are not a few others to whom my thanks are equally due; but it is feared that the number of names already mentioned may seem ridiculous, compared with the result, to those who do not appreciate from how many quarters the facts needful for a work which in its course intersects so many fields required to be collected, one by one.  I must not, however, omit acknowledgments to the present Earl of DERBY for his courteous permission, when at the head of the Foreign Office, to inspect Mr. Abbott’s valuable unpublished Report upon some of the Interior Provinces of Persia; and to Mr. T. T. COOPER, one of the most adventurous travellers of modern times, for leave to quote some passages from his unpublished diary.

PALERMO, 31st December, 1870.

[Original Dedication.]

TO
HER ROYAL HIGHNESS,
MARGHERITA,
Princess of Piedmont,
THIS ENDEAVOUR TO ILLUSTRATE THE LIFE AND WORK
OF A RENOWNED ITALIAN
IS
BY HER ROYAL HIGHNESS’S GRACIOUS PERMISSION
Dedicated
WITH THE DEEPEST RESPECT
BY

H. YULE.

[1] Cathay and The Way Thither, being a Collection of Minor Medieval
    Notices of China.  London, 1866.  The necessities of the case have
    required the repetition in the present work of the substance of some
    notes already printed (but hardly published) in the other.

[2] Viz.  Mr. Hugh Murray’s.  I mean no disrespect to Mr. T. Wright’s
    edition, but it is, and professes to be, scarcely other than
    a reproduction of Marsden’s, with abridgment of his notes.

[3] In the Quarterly Review for July, 1868.

[4] M. Nicolas Khanikoff.

[5] In the Preliminary Notices will be found new matter on the Personal
    and Family History of the Traveller, illustrated by Documents; and a
    more elaborate attempt than I have seen elsewhere to classify and
    account for the different texts of the work, and to trace their mutual
    relation.

As regards geographical elucidations, I may point to the explanation of the name Gheluchelan (i. p. 58), to the discussion of the route from Kerman to Hormuz, and the identification of the sites of Old Hormuz, of Cobinan and Dogana, the establishment of the position and continued existence of Keshm, the note on Pein and Charchan, on Gog and Magog, on the geography of the route from Sindafu to Carajan, on Anin and Coloman, on Mutafili, Cail, and Ely.

As regards historical illustrations, I would cite the notes regarding the Queens Bolgana