Cathay about the country from Chinese books and from conversation with people of all walks of life. During his first 15 years in China (1583–1598) Matteo Ricci formed a strong suspicion that Marco Polo's "Cathay" is simply the "Tatar" (i.e., Mongol) name for the country he was in, i.e. China. Ricci supported his arguments by numerous correspondences between Marco Polo's accounts and his own observations: Most importantly, when the Jesuits first arrived to Beijing 1598, they also met a number of "Mohammedans" or "Arabian Turks" – visitors or immigrants from the Muslim countries to the west of China, who told Ricci
Đại Cathay Đại Cathay Đại Cathay, whose real name was Lê Văn Đại was a notorious 1960s Saigon mobster, and was considered as the top or “number one” of the “Four Great Kings” of Saigon's criminal underworld before 1975. The Four Great Kings of the Saigon criminal underworld at the time referred to the four most powerful mobsters in the city, immortalized by the saying: 1st) Đại Cathay, 2nd) Huỳnh Tỳ, 3rd) Ngô Văn Cái, 4th) Ba Thế. Dai Cathay was born in 1940 as the son of Lê Văn Cự, who was a gangster in the market area of Cầu Muối.