There is no space in which to tell of the King's palace, with its gardens and orchards, its painted pavilions, and the groves where the palace ladies coursed the game with dogs, and, tired of the pastime, flung off their robes and ran to the lake, where they disported themselves like a shoal of silver fishes.

But a word must be said of the junks, which came sailing into the harbour four and twenty miles away, and up the river to the city; and of the great concourse of ships which came to Zaiton (perhaps the modern Amoy), the port of the province.

Here every year came a hundred times more pepper than came to the whole of Christendom through the Levantine ports.

Here from Indo China and the Indies came spices and aloes and sandalwood, nutmegs, spikenard and ebony, and riches beyond mention.

Big junks laded these things, together with musk from Tibet, and bales of silk from all the cities of Mansi[C], and sailed away in and out of the East India Archipelago, with its spice-laden breezes billowing their sails, to Ceylon.