88 BUFFET

    Lugou Bridge has been made famous by at least three historic events: Marco Polo's description, Emperor Qianlong's inscription and the outbreak of the War against the Japanese Aggressors. 
    Marco Polo, the great Italian traveller, saw it towards the end of the year 1276 during his tours in China under the Yuan Dynasty. In the book of travelogues bearing his name, Marco Polo gave a detailed description of it: “. . . a very great stone bridge. . . For you may know that there are few of them in the world so beautiful, nor its equal. . . It is made like this. I tell you that it is quite three hundred paces long and quite eight paces wide, for ten horsemen can well go there one beside the other. . . It is all of grey marble very well worked and well founded. There is above each side of the bridge a beautiful curtain or wall of flags of marble and pillars made so, as I shall tell you. . . And there is fixed at the head of the bridge a marble pillar,  and below the pillar a marble lion. . . very beautiful and large and well made. ”
    Almost from its very inception, namely in the Mingchang period (1190-1208) of the Jin Dynasty, the bridge was listed by travellers and men of letters as one of the “Eight Sight of Yanjing (Beijing)” under the descriptive title “Lugou Xiaoyue” or Moon Over Lugou at Daybreak (The Morning Moon Over Lugou Bridge ). 
??Less than seven hundred years after the erection of the stele, the Bridge witnessed, in July 7, 1937, the Japanese aggressors provoking Chinese troops into a protracted war of resistance ending only in 1945; but the Bridge itself had been largely spared the ravages of war.