trip to Hotan, where his earlier loan to the principality's queen mother was generously rewarded with jade. The Jesuit impressed the Yarkand-based ruler of Kashgaria Muhammad Sultan (r. 1592–1609), a descendant of Sultan Said Khan and a murid of Khoja Ishaq, with a gift of a mechanical watch and obtained from him a document for entry into the eastern "Kingdom of Cialis", which was ruled by Muhammad's son. The jade-laden "tribute" caravan left Yarkand in November 1604. They made a stop in Aksu, Xinjiang, which was still within Kashgarian Kingdom, and had Muhammad Sultan's 12-year-old nephew as its nominal ruler. The Jesuit befriended the boy with some sweets and a performance of a European dance and his mother with a variety of small gifts. The caravan then crossed the "desert of Caracathai", or "the Black Land of the Cathayans", which Góis learned was named after the "Cathayans [who] had lived there for a long time". The next major stop was the small but strongly-fortified city of Cialis, where the travelers spent three months, as the caravan's chief waited for more merchants to join. Although it follows from the geography of the route (between Kucha and Turpan) that Cialis had to be located somewhere within today's Bayin'gholin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, its identity has been a subject of speculation among later historians. Some thought that it was the city known to us as Korla (today, the capital of the prefecture), But others opined for Karashar, some 50 km farther to the northeast. It was in Cialis that Bento's caravan met with another caravan, returning from Beijing to Kashgaria. As the luck would have it, during their stay in Beijing, or "Cambalu", in Turkic, the Kashgarians had resided at the same facility for accommodating foreign visitors where Ricci, the first Jesuit to reach the Chinese capital, had been detained for a while. The returning Kashgarians told Góis what they knew about this new, unusual species of visitors to China, and they even showed him a piece of scrap paper with something written in Portuguese, apparently dropped by one of the Jesuits, which they had picked as a souvenir to show to their friends back home. Góis was overjoyed, now sure that the China Jesuits had been right identifying Marco Polo's Cathay as China and Cambalu as Beijing. Stuck in Suzhou Via Turpan and Hami, his caravan reached the Chinese border at Jiayuguan and