rovided with numerous bridges for the
passage of boats. Barrow gives a bright description of the lake, with its
thousands of gay, gilt, and painted pleasure boats, its margins studded
with light and fanciful buildings, its gardens of choice flowering shrubs,
its monuments, and beautiful variety of scenery. None surpasses that of
Martini, whom it is always pleasant to quote, but here he is too lengthy.
The most recent description that I have met with is that of Mr. C.
Gardner, and it is as enthusiastic as any. It concludes: "Even to us
foreigners ... the spot is one of peculiar attraction, but to the Chinese
it is as a paradise." The Emperor K'ien Lung had erected a palace on one
of the islands in the lake; it was ruined by the T'ai-P'ings. Many of the
constructions about the lake date from the flourishing days of the T'ang
Dynasty, the 7th and 8th centuries.

Polo's ascription of a circumference of 30 miles to the lake, corroborates
the supposition that in the compass of the city a confusion had been made
between miles and _li_, for Semedo gives the circuit of the lake really as
30 _li_. Probably the document to which Marco refers at the beginning of
the chapter was seen by him in a Persian translation, in which _li_ had
been rendered by _mil_. A Persian work of the same age, quoted by
Quatremere (the _Nuzhat al-Kultub_, gives the circuit of the lake as six
parasangs, or some 24 miles, a statement which probably had a like origin).

Polo says the lake was _within_ the city. This might be merely a loose way
of speaking, but it may on the other hand be a further indication of the
former existence of an extensive outer wall. The Persian author just
quoted also speaks of the lake as within the city. (_Barrow's Autobiog._,
p. 104; _V. Braam_, II. 154; _Gardner_ in _Proc. of the R. Geog. Soc._,
vol. xiii. p. 178; _Q. Rashid_, p. lxxxviii.) Mr. Moule states that
popular oral tradition does enclose the lake within the walls, but he can
find no trace of this in the Topographies.

Elsewhere Mr. Moule says: "Of the luxury of the (Sung) period, and its
devotion to pleasure, evidence occurs everywhere. Hang-chow went at the
time by the nickname of the melting-pot for money. The use, at houses of
entertainment, of _linen and silver plate_ appears somewhat out of keeping
in a Chinese picture. I cannot vouch for the linen, but here is the
plate.... 'The most famous Tea-houses of the day were the _Pa-seen_ ("8
genii"), the "Pure Deligh