The Khakhan had promised that we Polos would that night meet “two other visitors newly come from the West,” and they were present, seated at a table within speaking distance of his table and ours. They were not Westerners, but Han, and I recognized them as the two men I had seen dismounting from mules in the palace courtyard on the evening of our arrival, and I still had the feeling that I had seen them somewhere else even before that.
The tables at which we all sat were surfaced with a pinkish-lavender inlay of what looked to me like precious stones. And so they were, said our tablemate Chingkim:
“Amethyst,” he told me. “We Mongols have learned much from the Han. And the Han physicians have concluded that tables made of purple amethyst prevent drunkenness in those who sit drinking at them.”
I thought that interesting, but I should also have been interested to see how much drunker the company might have got without the countering influence of the amethyst. Kubilai was not alone in bellowing for kumis and arkhi and mao-tai and pu-tao, and ingesting quantities of all those beverages. Even of the resident Arabs and Persians, the only one who stayed Muslimly sedate and sober all night was the Wali Achmad. And the guzzling was not confined to the male guests; the female Mongols put away their share, too, and gradually got quite raucous and bawdy. The Han females kept to wine only, and only infrequent sips of it, and maintained their ladylike propriety.
But the company did not get drunk immediately, or all at once. The banquet began at what is in Kithai known as the Hour of the Cock, and the first guests did not stagger from the hall or slide insensible under the amethyst tables until well into the Hour of the Tiger, which is to say that the feasting and talking and laughing and entertainment lasted from early evening until just before dawn the next morning, and the general inebriation was not too evident until the tenth or eleventh hour of that twelve-hour festa.
“Onyx,” said Chingkim to me, and he pointed at the open area of the floor around the drink-pouring serpent tree, where at the moment two monstrously stout and sweatily naked Turki wrestlers were trying to dismember each other for our amusement. “The Han physicians have concluded that the black onyx stone imparts strength to those in contact with it. So the wrestling floor is paved with onyx to enliven the combatants.”
After the two Turki had crippled each other to the company’s satisfaction, we were regaled by a troupe of Uzbek girl singers, wearing gold-embroidered gowns of ruby red and emerald green and sapphire blue. The girls had rather pretty but exceptionally flat faces, as if their features were only painted on the fronts of their heads. They screeched for us some incomprehensible and interminable Uzbek ballads, in voices like ungreased wheels on a runaway wagon. Then some Samoyed musicians performed pieces of similar cacophony on an assortment of instruments —hand drums and finger cymbals and pipes resembling our fagotto and dulzaina.
Then there came Han jugglers who were far more entertaining, since they performed in silence as well as with incredible dexterity. It was astounding to see the tricks they could do with swords and rope loops and blazing torches, and how many such objects they could keep flying or spinning or suspended in the air at one time. But I really thought I could no longer trust my eyes when the jugglers began tossing into the air and to one another wine cups full of wine,and never spilling a drop! In the intervals between those performances, there wandered about the hall a tulhulos, which is a Mongol minstrel, sawing on a sort of three-stringed viella and dolefully wailing chronicles of battles and victories and heroes past.
Meanwhile, we all ate. And how we ate! We ate from paper-thin porcelain plates and bowls and platters, some softly colored in brown and cream colors, others blue with plum-color mottlings. I did not know then but later was told that those porcelains, called Chi-zho and Jen ware, were Han works of art, worthy of being treasured in collections, and not even the emperors of the Han would have dreamed of employing them for mere tableware. But, just as Kubilai had appropriated those art objects for his guests’ convenience, so had he acquired for his palace kitchens the foremost cooks of all Kithai, and those, more than the Chi-zho and Jen porcelain, were loudly appreciated by us guests. As we were served with each new course of the meal, and sampled it, the whole room would breathe “Hui!” and “Hao!” in approval, and the cook responsible for that particular dish would emerge from the kitchens and smile and ko-tou, and we would applaud him by clicking together our nimble tongs, making a cricket crepitation. I might remark that we guests were supplied with eating tongs of intricately carved ivory, but those used by Kubilai—so I was told by Chingkim—were made from the forearm bones of a gibbon ape, because such tongs will turn black if they touch poisoned food.
Our tablemate also explained each dish that came to our table, because almost every one was of Han origin and had a Han name that was most intriguing but gave no hint of the dish’s content, and I could not always determine what it was I was eating and applauding. Of course, at the start of the feasting, when the first dish was announced as Milk and Roses, I had no trouble seeing that those were simply white grapes and pink grapes. (A meal in the Han style goes contrary to ours; it begins with fruits and nuts and ends with a soup.) But when I was presented with a dish called Snow Babies, Chingkim had to explain that it was made of bean curd and the cooked flesh of frogs’ legs. And the dish called Red-Beaked Green Parrot with Gold-Trimmed Jade was a sort of multicolored custard containing the boiled and pulverized leaves of a Persian plant called aspanakh, creamed mushrooms and the petals of various flowers.
When the servants set before me One-Hundred-Year Eggs, I nearly declined them, for they were only hens’ and ducks’ eggs, hard-boiled, but the whites of them were a ghastly green and the yolks were black, and they smelleda hundred years old. However, Chingkim assured me that they were really only pickled, and only for sixty days, so I ate them and found them tasty. There were stranger things—the meat of bear paws, and fish lips, and a broth made of the saliva with which a certain bird glues its nest together, and pigeons’ feet in jelly, and a blob of substance called go-ba, which is a fungus that grows on ricestalks—but I valiantly partook of them all. There were also more recognizable foods—the miàn pasta in numerous shapes and sauces, dumplings stuffed and steamed, the familiar aubergine in an unfamiliar fish gravy.
The banquet, like the banqueters and the banquet hall, gave ample evidence that the Mongols had climbed a fair way from barbarism toward civilization, and had done it mainly by adopting so much of the Han people’s culture, from their foods to their costumes to their bathing habits to their architecture. But the banquet’s main culinary treat—the piatanza di prima portata—Chingkim said was a dish long ago devised by the Mongols, and only recently but happily adopted by the Han. They called it Windblown Duck, and Chingkim told me the complicated process of its preparation.
A duck, he said, came from egg to kitchen in exactly forty-eight days, then required forty-eight hours for the proper cooking. Its brief lifetime included three weeks of being force-fed (in the way that the Strasbourgeois of the Lorraine stuff their geese). The well-fatted fowl was killed and plucked and cleaned, and its body cavity was blown full of air and distended, and it was hung outdoors in a south wind. “Only a south wind will do,” said Chingkim. Then it was glazed by being smoked over a fire in which camphor burned. Then it was roasted over an ordinary fire, meanwhile being basted with wine and garlic and bead molasses and a fermented-bean sauce. Then it was cut up and served in bite-sized pieces—the flakes of crisp black skin being the most prized part—with lightly cooked onion greens and water chestnuts and a transparent miàn vermicelli, and if there was anything to make the Han people less resentful of their Mongol conquerors, in my opinion it must be Windblown Duck.