Volume 55, Number 15 · October 9, 2008
Marco Polo Goes to Gorgeous Xanadu
By Colin Thubron
Of all the travel sagas ever written, none is more richly astonishing than Marco Polo's Description of the World.[*] First published around 1300, it records a land of such fabulous difference that to enter it was like passing through a mirror; and it is this passage—from a still-provincial Europe to an empire of brilliant strangeness—which gives the tale even now a dream- like quality. Even in its day—and for generations afterward—Polo's book was often regarded merely as the fairy-tale conceit of a vainglorious merchant. Only with time has its portrait of China at the height of the Mongol dynasty—a portrait rich in details that once seemed too outlandish to be believed—been largely corroborated.
Feature, 3149 words
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