“Those are bulbs of the celestial lily, being readied for planting.” said the Master Gardener. (When later I saw them in bloom, I recognized the flower as what we in the West call the narcissus.) He held up one of the dry bulbs and pointed and said, “By making two very precise, minute incisions in the bulb, it will grow in the shape we deem most attractive for this flower. Two stems will spring from the bulb, sideways and apart. But then, as the stems leaf out, they will curve inward again. So the lovely flowers, when they bloom, will bend toward each other like arms about to embrace. To the beauty of the flower we add grace of line.”
“A remarkable art,” I murmured, refraining from saying that I considered it also a negligible one to occupy so many people.
The Palace Potter’s workshop, equally vast, was in the cellars underground and was lighted by lamps. His shop did not make crude table pottery, but the finest porcelain works of art. He showed me his bins of various clays and the mixing vessels and wheels and kilns and jars of colors and glazes which, he assured me, were “of most secret composition.” Then he took me to a table where some dozen of his apprentices were working. They each had a finished porcelain bud vase, elegant little things of bulbous body and high narrow neck, but still of raw clay color. The apprentices were painting them preparatory to their firing.
“Why are all the boys’ brushes broken?” I asked, for each young man was wielding a fine-haired brush that had a definite kink in its long handle.
“They are not broken,” said the Master Potter. “The brushes are specially angled. These apprentices are painting the designs of flowers, birds, reeds, whatever—purely by feel and instinct and art—onto the inside of the vases. When the article is finished, its decoration will be invisible except when it is set before a light, and then the paper-thin white porcelain will allow the colorful picture to be delicately, mistily, subtly seen.”
He led me to another table and said, “These are the newest and youngest apprentices, just learning their art.”
“What art?” I said. “They are playing with eggshells.”
“Yes. Porcelain objects of great value sometimes unfortunately get broken. These lads are learning to repair them. But naturally they do not practice on valuable articles. I take blown eggs and shatter their shells and give to each boy the commingled shards of two eggs. He must pick out and separate the fragments to reconstruct the two. That he does, putting each shell back together with those tiny brass rivets you see there. Not until an apprentice can rebuild an entire egg, so artfully that it appears never to have been broken, is he trusted to work on actual porcelain objects.”
Nowhere else in the world had I seen so many instances of capable men devoting their lives to such minikin pursuits, and high intelligence dedicated to trivial ends, and stupendous skill and labor expended on paltry endeavors. And I do not mean just among the court craftsmen. I saw much the same sort of thing even among the lofty ministers at the uppermost levels of the Khanate’s administration.
The Minister of History, for example, was a Han gentleman who looked ever so scholarly, and was fluent in many languages, and seemed to have memorized all of Western history as well as the Eastern. But his employment consisted only in being very busy at doing nothing worthwhile. When I asked what he was engaged upon at the moment, he got up from his big writing desk, opened a door of his chamber and showed me a much bigger chamber beyond. It was full of small writing desks very close together, and bent over each one was a scribe hard at work, almost hidden behind the books and rolled scrolls and sheaves of documents piled at his place.
Speaking perfect Farsi, the Minister of History said, “The Khakhan Kubilai decreed four years ago that his reign will commence a Yuan Dynasty comprising all subsequent reigns of his successors. The title he chose, Yuan, means ‘the greatest’ or ‘the principal.’ Which is to say, it must eclipse the lately extinguished Chin Dynasty, and the Xia before that, and every other dynasty dating back to the beginning of civilization in these lands. So I am compiling, and my assistants are writing, a glowing history to assure that future generations will recognize the supremacy of the Yuan Dynasty.”
“A deal of writing is being done, certainly,” I said, looking at all the bowed heads and twitching ink brushes. “But how much can there be to write, if the Yuan Dynasty is only four years old?”
“Oh, the recording of current events is nothing,” he said dismissively. “The difficult part is rewriting all the history that has gone before.”
“What? But how? History is history, Minister. History is what has happened.”
“Not so, Marco Polo. History is what is remembered of what has happened.”
“I see no difference,” I said. “If, say, a devastating flood of the Yellow River occurred in such and such a year, whether or not anyone made written record of the event, it is likely that the flood will be remembered and so will the date.”
“Ah, but not all the attendant circumstances. Suppose the then-emperor came promptly to the aid of the flood victims, and rescued them and fetched them to safe ground, and gave them new land and helped them again to prosperity. If those beneficent circumstances were to stay in the archives as part of the history of that reign, then this Yuan Dynasty might, by comparison, appear deficient in benevolence. So we change the history just slightly, to record that earlier emperor as having been callous to his people’s suffering.”
“And the Yuan seems kind by comparison? But suppose Kubilai and his successors prove to be truly callous in such calamities?”
“Then we must rewrite again, and make the earlier rulers more hardhearted. I trust you perceive now the importance of my work, and the diligence and creativeness required. It is no job for a lazy man, or a stupid one. History is not just a daily setting down of events, like keeping a ship’s log. History is a fluid process, and the work of a historian is never done.”
I said, “Historical events may be variously rendered, but current ones? For instance, in the Year of Our Lord one thousand two hundred seventy-five, Marco Polo arrived in Khanbalik. What more could be said of such a trifle?”
“If it is indeed a trifle,” said the Minister, smiling, “then it need not be mentioned in history at all. But it could prove later to be significant. So I make a note of even such a trifle, and wait to see if it should be inscribed in the archives as an occasion to be treasured or regretted.”
He went back to his writing desk, opened a large leather folder and riffled through the papers inside it. He picked out one and read from it:
“At the hour of Xu in the sixth day of the seventh moon, in the Year of the Boar, the year three thousand nine hundred seventy-three of the Han calendar, the year four of Yuan, there returned from the Western city of Wei-ni-si to the City of the Khan the two foreigners, Po-lo Ni-klo and Po-lo Mah-fyo, bringing with them a third and younger Po-lo Mah-ko. It remains to be seen whether this young man will make Khanbalik better for his presence”—he threw me a mischievous side glance, and I could tell that he was no longer reading from the paper—“or whether he will be merely a nuisance, inflicting himself upon busy officials and interrupting them in their pressing duties.”
“I will go away,” I said, laughing. “Just one last question, Minister. If you can write a whole new history, cannot someone else rewrite yours?”
“Of course,” he said. “And someone will.” He looked surprised that I had even asked. “When the late Chin Dynasty was new, its first Minister of History rewrote everything that had gone before. And Chin historians continued so to write, to make the Chin period appear the Golden Age of all time. But dynasties come and go; the Chin lasted only a hundred and nineteen years. It could well happen that the Yuan Dynasty and all I accomplish here”—he waved an arm to indicate his chamber and the other full of scribes—“may not outlast my own lifetime.”