Hildreth's Japan as It was and Is: A Handbook of Old Japan (Complete‪)‬

The first account of Japan, or allusion to its existence, to be found in any European writer, is contained in the “Oriental Travels” of the Venetian, Marco Polo, first reduced to writing in the Latin tongue, about A. D. 1298, while the author was detained a prisoner of war at Genoa. Zipangu, Zipangri, Cyampagu, Cimpagu, as different editions of his work have it, is his method of representing the Chinese Jih-pun-quo, sun-source kingdom, or kingdom of the source of the sun. The Japanese chronicles go back for many centuries previous; but these chronicles seem to be little more than a bare list of names and dates, with some legendary statements interwoven, of which the authority does not appear very weighty, nor the historical value very considerable.


Marco Polo resided for seventeen years (A. D. 1275-1292) at the court of Kublai Khan (grandson of the celebrated Ghingis Khan,) and ruler, from A. D. 1260 to A. D. 1294, over the most extensive empire which the world has ever seen. This empire stretched across the breadth of the old continent, from the Japanese, the Yellow, the Blue, and the China Seas (embosoming the Caspian and the Black Seas), to the Levant, the Archipelago, the river Dniester, and beyond it. Not content with having added Anatolia and Russia to the western extremity of this vast kingdom,—the Greek empire being reduced, at this moment, to the vicinage of Constantinople and the western coasts of the Archipelago,—Kublai Khan, after completing the conquest of Southern China, sent an expedition against Japan; in which, however, the Mongols were no more successful than they had been in their attempts, a few years before, to penetrate through Hungary and Poland (which they overran and ravaged, to the terror of all Europe) in Germany, whence Teutonic valor repelled them.

The accounts given by Marco Polo, and by the Chinese and Japanese annalists, of this expedition, though somewhat contradictory as to the details, agree well enough as to the general result. As Marco Polo’s account is short, as well as curious, we insert it at length, from the English translation of his travels by Marsden, subjoining to it the statements which we have of the same event derived from Chinese and Japanese sources. We may add that Columbus was greatly stimulated to undertake his western voyages of discovery by the constant study of Marco Polo’s travels, confidently expecting to reach by that route the Cathay and Zipangu of that author—countries for which he sedulously inquired throughout the Archipelago of the West Indies, and along the southern and western shores of the Caribbean Sea.