Page:Further India; (IA furtherindia00clif).pdf/63

tion in southeastern Asia, yet we have felt constrained to follow Marco Polo closely because the figure of this early European wanderer is at once so interesting, so picturesque and so romantic, and the imagination is tempted to dwell and linger over the story of the three lonely white men who so far as we have any record, were the first of their kind to sojourn for a season amid the mysterious forests of Malaya-the lands which were fated to become at a later period the heritage of the nations of the West.

The impossibility of fixing even approximately the date which first saw the opening-up of the sea-route to China has already been noted, and though Messer Marco Polo is the earliest European wanderer in the Far East who has become for us articulate, it is possible that many before him penetrated to Cathay or traversed the seas of which he wrote. The wide dissemination of Nestorian Christianity from Jerusalem eastward to Peking, which had taken place by the fourteenth century, argues a closer intercourse between the West and the East via the overland route than is generally recognised, while the celebrated inscription disinterred at Sing-an-fu proves that the heretical doctrine was publicly preached in China, and received sanction and encouragement from the authorities, as early as the seventh century. That the intercourse which is thus implied was carried on wholly by land seems the reverse of probable, yet the fact remains that no authentic record of Europeans having travelled through southeastern Asia is to be found earlier than the date of the Polo manuscripts.