The Silk Road Page #2

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After a grueling trek through

modern day Iran and Afghanistan,

Polo describes his confrontation

with the Pamirs,

the infamous mountain range

that separates East and West.

altitude and frostbite were

the least of Polo's problems.

"There are innumerable wolves

and the bones of their kill

are stacked by the roadside

to serve as landmarks to travelers

in the bleak winter."

Polo sought refuge in local villages.

"I give you my word that

if a stranger comes to a house here

to seek hospitality

he receives a very warm welcome.

The host bids his wife do everything

that the guest wishes.

The women are beautiful,

vivacious and always ready to please."

Marco Polo's description of

these enticing beauties of the East,

of their being so subservient fits in

with a pattern that has continued

throughout the ages of eastern women

having some sort of exotic

and erotic appeal.

There's an attempt to make the east

more exotic than it really is.

According to his story,

Polo now entered the Taklamakan desert

the most forbidding obstacle

along the old Silk Road.

With 1000 foot high dunes

and swirling sandstorms,

the Taklamakan is 600 miles of hell.

The Chinese call it

the desert of death.

The temperature of the desert is formidable.

In the summer, the temperature

can reach up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

There's no water, in the desert.

There's no wells.

So you're walking through

a sea of sand

and it's very difficult to think that

you might come out the other end.

It is here that Polo and his story

walk into a heated controversy.

Did Polo really make it

across the Taklamakan into China?

Or is the story of his arrival

in the East a complete fabrication?

Marco Polo has a format

when he travels.

He goes from city to city.

He tells you where he is

and he tells you how far it is

from one point to the next.

When he goes to visit the Mongol

capital he departs from that format.

He no longer tells you

the cities in between

where he is in north China

and what's at the Mongol capital.

So the effect when you're reading it

is very abrupt.

Did he go, how did he go,

what cities are in between?

And the only conclusion

I can draw is he didn't go,

that somebody told him about it

and he just adds it in.

This was a custom of travel writing

during that time.

You'd hear something and you'd claim

that you actually had been

and had actually witnessed the events

that somebody else told you about.

This has been taken by some scholars

to mean that he probably didn't travel

all the way to China.

That is taking things

a little too far.

Marco Polo wrote about his travels

while he was in prison.

That obviously is going to affect

the way he presents his information.

He's at a difficult time in his life

and he wants to attract an audience

so he's going to emphasize

the strangest and the most interesting

rather than the ordinary elements

of his travels.

From his squalid cell in Italy,

Marco wrote about the luxurious court

of Kublai Khan, the Mongol king,

which he supposedly reached in 1275.

He told how in Shengdu,

the city later immortalized as Xanadu,

the trials of his 4 year journey

suddenly seemed worthwhile.

"The Khan's palace is the largest

in the world.

The roof is ablaze with every color

it glitters like crystals and sparkles

from afar.

The hall is so vast that

it could seat 6000 for one banquet."

The descriptions that Marco Polo

provides for us,

descriptions of Xanadu for example,

the summer palace of Kublai Khan

dovetail with what we know of

the archeology of that city.

The city was excavated

in the 1930s by the Japanese

and they found that the placement of

the buildings

and the style of the buildings

was exactly the way Marco Polo

had described them.

The Venetian trader

was equally impressed, it seems,

by the mighty Yangtze river.

"It is the greatest river

in the world.

More boats loaded with more dear

things and of greater value come and go

by this river than by all the rivers

and seas used by the Christians."

Marco could not have asked for more.

He had made it safely to China.

He had discovered a land of

unimaginable wealth.

His quest to establish a lucrative

trade connection with the east

was very much on course.

It is here,

on the threshold of his dream,

that Marco's account

turns fantastical.

He says that he sees a fish that's a

hundred feet long that has fur on it.

He describes how the animals bow

to visitors at the Khan's court.

Like the tigers came out

and they take a bow on cue.

So you know it's just things that

when you read it cannot have happened.

The bizarre sections in Marco Polo

of animal headed people

and strange looking fish,

this is something that is not unusual.

The conventions of travel writing

during that time fit in with

the kind of mythologizing and

fantasizing that Marco Polo includes.

Equally controversial is

the total absence of any reference

to unique Chinese rituals

that would have amazed a European

seeing them for the first time.

Marco Polo does not mention certain

characteristics of China

such as calligraphy, tea, bound feet

because Marco Polo lived

among the Mongols.

He dealt with Kublai Khan and the

other members of the Mongol nobility.

He didn't deal with the Chinese.

So just because he didn't mention

those things

doesn't mean that

he didn't reach China.

Marco Polo's defenders

point to details

which could not have been

invented in Europe.

"Throughout the province of Cathay

there are large black stones

dug from the mountains which burn

and make flames like logs."

Marco Polo was the first European

to ever write about coal

a treasure that transformed the world.

Marco Polo was definitely in China.

I am absolutely convinced of it because

of the tremendous detail in his book

his descriptions of the Mongols:

Mongol customs, Mongol dress,

Mongol attitudes towards women.

And in addition he describes

specific events so clearly.

The assassination of

a finance minister.

Now who would have known about that

if you hadn't been in China?

The reason I don't think Marco Polo

went to China is that

there are basic factual inaccuracies

in the book.

He says he's the governor of a town

and we have a list of governors

of that town, Yangzhou,

and he's not on the list.

And the second is he says he's

at a battle that took place in 1273

and we know the battle took place in

Perhaps the secret to the mystery of

Polo's account

lies in his prison cell in Italy.

Marco did not write the book himself.

He dictated it,

during his year in jail,

to his cellmate, Rustichello

who happened to be a writer

with a passion for fairytales.

Rustichello was a man

whose renowned for writing romances

and not actual descriptions of events.

And so obviously the fact that

Rustichello rather than Marco Polo

set down the work may have added some

of these legendary

and mythical qualities to the work

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