Marco Polo's route did not actually take him directly from the Pamir Highland to Beiiing, as our own journey would.In fact, he stayed for over a year in Kan-chau (Zhangye), during which he visited the ancient city of Etzina (located in today's Ejin Banner). After that,he continued north all the way through Russia and finally ended up at the Arctic Ocean. We decided to trace part of his detour as far as Ejin Banner, which required traversing yet another vast expanse of desert called the Badain Jaran.

This little boy is standing in dried-up Sogo Nur, a sad reminder of it's fomer glory.

The city Marco Polo called Kalachan was somewhere in today's Alxa League, a large area encompassing both Alxa Left Banner and Alxa Right Banner, a banner being equivalent to a county. Seven centuries ago Marco Polo saw a land full of wildlife, domestic animals, pine forests and lakes full of fish. Although one still sees camels, sheep and wild donkeys, the pine forests have long since disappeared, as have most of the bodies of water in the region. The two lakes just north of Ejin Banner shown on all maps of Inner Mongolia used to be one large lake. Today, however, one has completely dried up and the other seems destined to soon follow suit.

The last time we travelled across a desert, we suffered from intestinal and stomach troubles and our car broke down over and over again, This time, we did not dare run the risk of cutting across the Badain Jaran Desert to Ejin Banner. Instead,starting from Yinchuan we took the state road to Ejin stopping over in Alxa Left Banner (Bayan Hot), which gave us a good chance to get to knoow this ancient city. We were required to go through various procedures in order to get a travel permit,which was needed because our destination was quite near the Sino-Mongolian border. Therefore,we had a free afternoon in Alxa Left Banner to visit a former prince's palace, which is now a museum of history.

The seculptural style of this lion in the prince's mansion is rarely seen elsewhere in China.

As we entered the palace, we suddenly tell as if we had been there before. After going round two courtyards, we found that the layout and structure of the place was exactly the same as that of the quadrangles in Beijing - walled enclosures with houses opening onto a central courtyard. The last prince of the Alxa League married a niece of Aisin Gioro Pu Yi, the last emperor of the Qing Dynasty. He often went to Beijing, and tell in love with the design of Beijing's quadrangles. He employed craftsmen from Beijing to build a quadrangle for his palace, and thereafter his subjects had their own houses built according to the prince's model. In only a couple of years, quadrangles had developed to a considerable scale, once earning Alxa Left Banner the name of "Lesser Beiiing". In recent years, with the construction of new blocks,many old quadrangles have been pulled down. The remaining ones are located on a plot of land in the town centre.

On display in the main hall of the museum were traditional Mongolian clothes, weapons and articles of daily use. The curator told us that the two groups of statues, each clothed in a different style, represented the two Mongolian tribal groups living in Alxa League.

In another hall we saw an exhibition on the history of Ejin, which included objects excavated from ancient fortresses. There were clay sculptures of the Buddha made in various dynasties from the Han to the Qing, porcelain, jewelry, weapons and coins. The curator told us that the ancient city of Juyan, which flourished during the Western Ha

Dynasty, is located in Ejin Banner and is now called Heichengzi. The ruins of beacon towers and the Great Wall run along a 200-kilometre-long stretch of desert, from Jinta County near Jiayuguan in Gansu Province to Ejin, In particular, many precious historical relics have been excavated from the large- scale ruins of Heichengzi at the northernmost end of this stretch.

After our visit at the museum over, we left the downtown area and went northwest to visit the Alxa League Camel Hair Cloth Mill. Marco Polo was profuse in his praise of the white camel hair cloth produced here. He wrote that it was exported by merchants far and wide to many countries,

including Khitan. All the work in this mill is done by machine. In the exhibition room, we saw camel hair sweaters in various styles, and also camel hair cloth, which most likely is the curiously-named "camlets" described in his book.

Judging from the thickness of the remaining walls, one can imagine the magnificence and prosperity of Heichengzi in its heyday.