Marco Polo
translation: Henry Yule, Henri Cordier

THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO
Volume II.
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BADAKHSHAN.

"The Chinese name for 'Badakhshan' never appears before the Pa-ta-shan of
Kúblái's time." (E.H. PARKER, Asiatic Quart. Rev., Jan., 1904, p. 143.)

XXX., pp. 164-166. "You must know that ten days' journey to the south of Badashan there is a province called PASHAI, the people of which have a peculiar language, and are Idolaters, of a brown complexion. They are great adepts in sorceries and the diabolic arts. The men wear earrings and brooches of gold and silver set with stones and pearls. They are a pestilent people and a crafty; and they live upon flesh and rice. Their country is very hot."

Sir A. STEIN writes (Ancient Khotan, I., pp. 14-15 n.): "Sir Henry Yule was undoubtedly right in assuming that Marco Polo had never personally visited these countries and that his account of them, brief as it is, was derived from hearsay information about the tracts which the Mongol partisan leader Nigudar had traversed, about 1260 A.D., on an adventurous incursion from Badakhshan towards Kashmir and the Punjab. In Chapter XVIII., where the Venetian relates that exploit (see Yule, Marco Polo, I., p. 98, with note, p. 104), the name of Pashai is linked with Dir, the territory on the Upper Panjkora river, which an invader, wishing to make his way from Badakhshan into Kashmir by the most direct route, would necessarily have to pass through.

"The name Pashai is still borne to this day by a Muhamadanized tribe closely akin to the Siah-posh, settled in the Panjshir Valley and in the hills on the west and south of Kafiristan. It has been very fully discussed by Sir Henry Yule (Ibid., I., p. 165), who shows ample grounds for the belief that this tribal name must have once been more widely spread over the southern slopes of the Hindu kush as far as they are comprised in the limits of Kafiristan. If the great commentator nevertheless records his inability to account for Marco Polo's application of 'the name Pashai to the country south-east of Badakhshan,' the reason of the difficulty seems to me to lie solely in Sir Henry Yule's assumption that the route heard of by the traveller, led 'by the Doráh or the Nuksán Pass, over the watershed of Hindu kúsh into Chitrál and so to Dir.'

"Though such a route via Chitral would, no doubt, have been available in Marco Polo's time as much as now, there is no indication whatever forcing us to believe that it was the one really meant by his informants. When Nigudar 'with a great body of horsemen, cruel unscrupulous fellows' went off from Badakhshan towards Kashmir, he may very well have made his way over the Hindu kúsh by the more direct line that passes to Dir through the eastern part of Kafiristan. In fact, the description of the Pashai people and their country, as given by Marco Polo, distinctly points to such a route; for we have in it an unmistakable reflex of characteristic features with which the (...)

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