ty has been found a minute setting
forth the fact that a certain Polo, undoubtedly young Marco, was
nominated a second-class commissioner attached to the privy council of
the Empire, in the year 1277. His first mission appears to have taken
him on public business to the provinces of Shansi, Shensi, Sechuen and
Yunnan, in the southern and southwestern part of China, and east of
Thibet. Even now, those regions are comparatively unknown to the rest of
the world; and one must needs admire the intrepidity of the young
Venetian who penetrated their wild mountain fastnesses, traced their
mighty rivers, and carried away for the delight of the Great Khan, much
novel information concerning the peoples that so numerously flourished
in that cradle of the human race.

In his book Marco Polo does not greatly magnify himself and his office,
and it is only incidentally, as it were, that we know that he was for
three years governor of the great city of Yangchau. Following the
details laid down in his book, the accuracy of which we have no reason
to doubt, we find him visiting the old capital of the Khans, in
Mongolia, employed in Southern Cochin-China, and on a mission to the
Indian Seas, when he visited some of the states of India, of which
Europeans at that time had only dimly heard the most fabulous and vague
accounts. That the Polos were all favorites of the Great Khan is
sufficiently evident; but it does not appear that any but Marco was in
the employment of the Khan. All three of them doubtless made hay while
the sun shone, and gathered wealth as they could, trading with the
people and making use of their Venetian shrewdness in dealing with the
natives, who were no match for the cunning traders from the Rialto.

Naturally, they longed to carry their wealth and their aged heads--for
the two elders were now well stricken in years--safely back to their
beloved Venice on the Adriatic, so far away. But Kublai Khan would not
listen to any of their suggestions, and turned a deaf ear to their
hints. A happy chance intervened to bring them out of the wild,
mysterious realm of the Great Khan. Arghun, Khan of Persia, a
great-nephew of Kublai, had lost by death his favorite wife, who was of
one of the Mongol tribes, and who, dying in 1286, laid a parting
injunction on the Khan that he should wed none but a Mongol princess.
Sorely mourning her, the Persian Khan sent an embassy to the court of
Kublai Khan to solicit a suitable bride for him. T