Note {4} — Chapter LXXVII
Henry Yule translation
Note 4.—There is no mention of pork, the characteristic animal food of China, and the only one specified by Friar Odoric in his account of the same city. Probably Mark may have got a little Saracenized among the Mahomedans at the Kaan’s Court, and doubted if ’twere good manners to mention it. It is perhaps a relic of the same feeling, gendered by Saracen rule, that in Sicily pigs are called i neri.