Deadly injustice

PREFACE

The extraordinary life of Niccolo Zuliani (1232?-1320?) is only just coming to the notice of scholars as various documents begin to emerge from China. That he preceded Marco Polo to the heart of Kubilai Khan’s Mongol Empire is now undisputed. The details of his life there are a matter for scholarly argument and debate. Much of what we know to date is based on the account known as The Life and Travels of Messer Niccolo Zuliani written by the Chinese scholar Xian Lin in the early 1300s. He claims to have copied down his account ‘from the lips of Messer Zuliani in the last years of his long and varied life.’ However, it now appears that by 1310 Zuliani was no longer in China, but back in Venice, where he lived for at least another ten years. But if Lin’s words about Zuliani’s ‘last years’ are not taken literally, and perhaps as meaning his last years in Cathay, then there is no conflict in these facts.

How Zuliani arrived in Kubilai’s summer capital, Shang-tu — more dramatically called Xanadu by some — has already been told in the first volume of his travels (City of the Dead, Severn House, 2008). This second volume centres on an investigation undertaken by Zuliani deeper inside Cathay, and is intriguing for scholars for a particular reason. He watches, for the first time, a Chinese play in the genre kung-an, or crime case, and he meets a playwright called Guan Han-Ching. A person called Kuan or Guan Hanqing is now deemed to be one of the most accomplished of the playwrights from Yuan times in China. His best known play is The Injustice to Dou-E or Snow in Midsummer, concerning the unjust execution of a young woman. She is exonerated, and calls down curses on the people who executed her, including a fall of snow in midsummer. If the playwright that Zuliani met was indeed the same person — and the case Zuliani is investigating has some vague resemblance to the story of Guan’s play — then this is a very intriguing insight into a period when the Mongols were patrons of the theatre. Was the playwright we know the one in the chronicles? If so, then Guan emerges as a person concerned with justice and the conflict between Chin and Mongol ways. This is especially intriguing as Zuliani’s chronicler, Xian Lin, claims of his text that ‘every word is accurate.’ After studying it for a year, I have no reason to believe otherwise.

Dr Brian Luckham

Manchester Trafford University, 2011