Modern music had seven notes, but traditional court music had only five: gong, shang, jue, zhi, and yu. Music introduced from the Western Regions, however, already had seven tones.
The seven notes of Western Regions music differed from the scales of the "West," hence the name Kucha music—a form of music and dance found only in the Western Regions.
According to legend, Marco Polo was born into a Venetian merchant family. At seventeen, he left his homeland with his father and uncle, traveling east along the overland Silk Road. They first entered Persia, crossed the desert to reach Khorasan, then followed the route Xuanzang had taken back to the Tang Empire and entered the Hexi Corridor. Yet rather than following the Hexi Corridor into the Central Plains, they headed north across the desert into Mongolia, arriving at Xanadu, capital of the great Mongol Empire, to pay homage to the Great Khan, Kublai Khan.
Perhaps Marco Polo had heard Kucha music along the way and seen the dances performed during worship in the Western Regions. Afterward, Marco Polo visited many provinces and cities, including Hangzhou, which he described as the most prosperous city in the world.
At the time, it was the Southern Song dynasty, and the Mongols were busy incorporating the southern territories into their empire. Yet The Travels of Marco Polo divided the three ethnic states of the East into Tatars—the Mongols' state—Khitan, a region originally ruled by the Jin dynasty before later being conquered by the Mongols, and the "Manzi Kingdom," the Mongols' name for the Southern Song dynasty.
This left the West with a lingering, unresolved puzzle. The Mongols called others barbarians too? Yet according to Marco Polo, there were quite a few Christians in Khitan, while the Manzi Kingdom had few Christians. Thus, Westerners developed a