Japan and the Japanese

JAPAN AND THE JAPANESE.
CHAPTER I.
EARLIEST EUROPEAN KNOWLEDGE OF JAPAN. JAPANESE HISTOEIES. MARCO
POLO'S ACCOUNT OF THE MONGOL OH TARTAR INVASION. ACCOUNTS Of
THE SAME EVENT GIVEN BY THE CHINESE AND JAPANESE ANNALISTS, A. D.
1231 OR 1283.
THE name JAPAN, pronounced in the country itself Ne'pon or
Nifon, is of Chinese origin
in the Mandarin dialect Jih-pun,
that is, sun-source, or Eastern Country.
The first account of Japan, or allusion to its existence, to be
found in any European writer,
is contained in the Oriented Travels
of the Venetian, Marco Polo, first reduced to writing in the Latin
tonfme, about A. D. 1298, while the author was detained a prisoner
O ' i
of war at Genoa. ZIPAXGU, ZIPANGRI, CYAMPAGU, CIMPAGC, as dif-
erent 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. 1200 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.
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