Marco Polo
translation: Henry Yule, Henri Cordier

THE TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO
Volume II.
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CHAPTER LVI.

DISCOURSES OF THE PROVINCE OF CAUGIGU.

Caugigu is a province towards the east, which has a king.[NOTE 1] The people are Idolaters, and have a language of their own. They have made their submission to the Great Kaan, and send him tribute every year. And let me tell you their king is so given to luxury that he hath at the least 300 wives; for whenever he hears of any beautiful woman in the land, he takes and marries her.

They find in this country a good deal of gold, and they also have great abundance of spices. But they are such a long way from the sea that the products are of little value, and thus their price is low. They have elephants in great numbers, and other cattle of sundry kinds, and plenty of game. They live on flesh and milk and rice, and have wine made of rice and good spices. The whole of the people, or nearly so, have their skin marked with the needle in patterns representing lions, dragons, birds, and what not, done in such a way that it can never be obliterated. This work they cause to be wrought over face and neck and chest, arms and hands, and belly, and, in short, the whole body; and they look on it as a token of elegance, so that those who have the largest amount of this embroidery are regarded with the greatest admiration.

NOTE 1.—No province mentioned by Marco has given rise to wider and wilder conjectures than this, Cangigu as it has been generally printed.

M. Pauthier, who sees in it Laos, or rather one of the states of Laos called in the Chinese histories Papesifu, seems to have formed the most probable opinion hitherto propounded by any editor of Polo. I have no doubt that Laos or some part of that region is meant to be described, and that Pauthier is right regarding the general direction of the course here taken as being through the regions east of Burma, in a north-easterly direction up into Kwei-chau. But we shall be able to review the geography of this tract better, as a whole, at a point more advanced. I shall then speak of the name CAUGIGU, and why I prefer this reading of it.

I do not believe, for reasons which will also appear further on, that Polo is now following a route which he had traced in person, unless it be in the latter part of it.

M. Pauthier, from certain indications in a Chinese work, fixes on Chiangmai or Kiang-mai, the Zimmé of the Burmese (in about latitude 18° 48' and long. 99° 30') as the capital of the Papesifu and of the Caugigu of our text. It can scarcely however be the latter, unless we throw over entirely all the intervals stated in Polo's itinerary; and M. Garnier informs me that he has evidence that the capital of the Papesifu at this time was Muang-Yong, a little to the south-east of Kiang-Tung, where he has seen its ruins.[1] That the people called by the Chinese Papesifu were of the great race of Laotians, Sháns, or Thai, is very certain, from the (...)

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