Book extract: historian sheds new light on Marco Polo’s China travels, which have often been doubted
- Tall tales of the East told by Marco Polo have had their sceptics, but author Christopher Harding highlights details that make the explorer harder to doubt
Extracted from The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East by Christopher Harding, published by Allen Lane, January 2024
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“Honoured emperors and kings, dukes and marquesses, counts, knights and townspeople, and all who want to know about the various races of mankind and the peculiarities of the various regions of the world, take this book and have it read to you!
“Here you will find all the greatest wonders and chief curiosities of Greater Armenia and Persia, of the Tartars and India, and of many other lands. Our book will lay them out for you in the proper order as related by Messer Marco Polo, a wise and noble citizen of Venice, who has seen them with his own eyes.”
Roll up, roll up … When recited aloud, as they were intended to be, the opening lines of The Description of the World – better known as The Travels of Marco Polo – have the feel of a stallholder hawking his wares. And well they might: this was retail of a kind, part of a broader commercial revolution.
By the time of Marco Polo’s birth, in 1254, his home city of Venice had gone from being a client state of the Byzantine Empire to a formidable maritime and trading power in its own right, dominating much of the Adriatic and Aegean and capable of capitalising on Byzantine weakness and the upheaval of the Crusades.
