![]() ![]() Polo's is not the first account in a European language to discuss Chinese people with some specificity. It was the first such work by a Westerner to claim to look at China from the inside, and the force of the narrative description was strong enough to imprint itself in Western minds down to our own time. The same is true of other works written before and afterwards, but what matters to us about Polo's text is that Purporting to describe the travels that Marco Polo took through Asia between 12, andĬoncentrating especially on the period from 1275 to 1292 when Polo lived and worked in China as an agent for the Mongol ruler of China, Kublai Khan, the book is a combination of verifiable fact, random information posing as statistics,Įxaggeration, make-believe, gullible acceptance of unsubstantiated stories, and a certain amount of outright fabrication. Usually known as the Travels, was dictated to a man named Rusticello in the year 1298, while Polo was in jail or under house arrest. As far as we know, Marco Polo's book The Description of the World, ![]() ![]() It is entirely appropriate to the course of our own exploration that the first Western work devoted mainly to China should be evasive and problematic. ![]()
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