Marco Polo in China: A Venetian at Kublai Khan's Court (1275)

Marco Polo, a young Venetian merchant, reached the court of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan in China around 1275 and spent roughly 17 years in the service of the Yuan dynasty. The book of his travels, dictated in a Genoese prison around 1298, became the most widely read European description of Asia in the Middle Ages. It shaped how Europeans imagined China for two centuries and later inspired explorers such as Christopher Columbus.

Background: the Mongol peace and the Polo brothers

In the 13th century the Mongol conquests created a chain of linked khanates stretching from Korea to the Black Sea. Although the Mongol empire had split into rival states by the 1260s, its rulers protected trade routes and relay stations, and merchants could travel overland between Europe and China more easily than ever before. Historians sometimes call this period the Pax Mongolica, the Mongol peace.

Venice was one of the great trading cities of the Mediterranean, with bases in Constantinople and the Crimea. Around 1260 two Venetian brothers, Niccolò and Maffeo Polo, travelled east from the Black Sea to trade. War between Mongol khanates blocked their way home, and they ended up joining an embassy to Kublai Khan, the Mongol Great Khan who ruled China and Mongolia.

Kublai received them with interest. When the brothers returned to Europe in 1269, they carried a request to the pope for about a hundred learned Christian teachers and for oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Niccolò found that his wife had died, and that his son Marco, born around 1254, was now a teenager.

The journey east (1271–c. 1275)

In 1271 the Polo brothers set out again, this time taking the 17-year-old Marco. At Acre in the Holy Land they met Teobaldo Visconti, who was soon elected Pope Gregory X. The new pope could not supply a hundred scholars; he sent two Dominican friars, Nicholas of Vicenza and William of Tripoli, but both turned back early in the journey through fear of war.

The Polos travelled from the port of Ayas (Laiazzo) through Anatolia and Persia to Hormuz on the Persian Gulf, apparently hoping to take ship to India. Instead they went overland across Persia and Afghanistan, over the Pamir mountains, and along the southern rim of the Taklamakan Desert through oasis towns such as Kashgar and Khotan. They crossed the edge of the Gobi Desert and entered China through Gansu, where Marco later said they stayed for a long time in the city of Ganzhou.

Marco’s book says the journey took three and a half years, including a long illness that he recovered from in the mountains of Badakhshan. Around 1275 the travellers reached Kublai’s summer capital at Shangdu, known in Europe as Xanadu.

At the court of Kublai Khan

Kublai Khan (reigned 1260–1294) had proclaimed the Yuan dynasty in 1271 and was then completing the conquest of the Southern Song, whose capital at Hangzhou surrendered in 1276. His court relied heavily on foreigners: Central Asians, Persians, Uyghurs and others served as officials and tax collectors, partly because the Mongols did not fully trust their new Chinese subjects. A capable young Latin Christian who learned languages quickly fitted this pattern.

According to the book, Marco learned several languages, probably including Mongolian and Persian, which was a common language of trade and administration in the Mongol world. There is no evidence that he read Chinese. Kublai is said to have sent him on missions across the empire, including a long journey to Yunnan in the south-west, and Marco claimed that he governed the city of Yangzhou for three years. Chinese records do not confirm the governorship, and many scholars think he held a lesser post, perhaps connected with the salt administration.

Marco described things that astonished European readers. He wrote about paper money backed by imperial authority, a postal relay network with horses kept ready at regular stations, “black stones” (coal) burned for fuel, and the vast wealth of Kublai’s winter capital Khanbaliq, the city now called Beijing. His description of Hangzhou, which he called Quinsai, portrayed one of the largest and richest cities in the world, with canals, markets and bathhouses.

Return to Venice and the book

Around 1291 or 1292 the Polos finally gained permission to leave. They were assigned to escort a Mongol princess, Kököchin, who was to marry Arghun, the Mongol ruler of Persia. The party sailed from the port of Quanzhou (Zaiton) with a fleet of junks, passing through Sumatra, Sri Lanka and India. The voyage took about two years and many of the passengers died. When they reached Persia, Arghun had already died, so Kököchin married his son Ghazan instead.

The Polos reached Venice in 1295. A few years later Marco was captured by the Genoese, Venice’s great commercial rivals, traditionally after the naval Battle of Curzola in 1298, although some historians think it was a smaller clash. In prison in Genoa he met Rustichello da Pisa, a writer of Arthurian romances, and dictated his memories to him.

The result, known in Italian as Il Milione and in French as Le Devisement du monde (“The Description of the World”), was written in a literary mixture of French and Italian. It is less a travel diary than a geography of Asia, arranged region by region, with much detail on trade goods, customs and wealth. About 150 manuscripts survive in many languages, and no two are exactly alike, so scholars still debate what the original text said. Marco was released, married, had three daughters and lived as a merchant in Venice until his death in January 1324.

Key people

• Marco Polo (c. 1254–1324): Venetian merchant whose account of Asia made him the best-known medieval European traveller.
• Niccolò and Maffeo Polo: Marco’s father and uncle, who made the first journey to Kublai’s court in the 1260s.
• Kublai Khan (1215–1294): Mongol Great Khan and founder of the Yuan dynasty, who welcomed foreign servants at his court.
• Rustichello da Pisa: romance writer who turned Marco’s recollections into a book, adding some literary flourishes.

Myths and facts: did Marco Polo really go to China?

Doubts about Marco Polo are almost as old as his book; some contemporaries thought he exaggerated. In 1995 the British Library scholar Frances Wood argued in Did Marco Polo Go to China? that he might have collected stories from Persian or Arab merchants without travelling beyond the Black Sea. She noted that he never mentions the Great Wall, tea drinking, chopsticks, printing or the binding of women’s feet, and that his name does not appear in surviving Chinese sources.

Most specialists reject this view. Much of the Great Wall that tourists see today was built under the Ming dynasty, long after Marco’s time. In 1941 the Chinese historian Yang Zhijiu found a passage in a Chinese source recording three envoys, Oulatai, Apusha and Huozhe, sent to accompany a bride to Arghun. Marco names the same three envoys, as Oulatai, Apusca and Coja, a detail he could hardly have invented.

In 2013 the German sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel showed that Marco’s descriptions of Yuan paper currency, salt production and tax revenues are more accurate than those of any other foreign writer of the period. The general conclusion today is that Marco Polo did go to China, but that his book mixes first-hand observation with hearsay, boasting and romance-style writing.

Two other popular stories are simply untrue. Marco Polo did not bring pasta to Italy; dried pasta was known there before 1295. Nor could he have helped Kublai’s army capture Xiangyang with siege engines, as some versions of his book claim, because that siege ended in 1273, before the Polos arrived.

Timeline

• c. 1254: Marco Polo is born, probably in Venice.
• c. 1260–1269: Niccolò and Maffeo Polo travel east and visit Kublai Khan.
• 1271: Marco leaves Acre with his father and uncle; Kublai proclaims the Yuan dynasty.
• c. 1275: The Polos reach Kublai’s summer capital at Shangdu.
• 1276: The Southern Song capital Hangzhou surrenders to Yuan forces.
• c. 1291–1292: The Polos leave China by sea, escorting the princess Kököchin to Persia.
• 1295: The Polos return to Venice.
• c. 1298–1299: In a Genoese prison, Marco dictates his book to Rustichello da Pisa.
• January 1324: Marco Polo dies in Venice.

Legacy

Marco Polo’s book circulated widely in manuscript and was printed in the 15th century. Mapmakers drew on it: the Catalan Atlas of 1375 includes place names that come from his account. Christopher Columbus owned a printed Latin edition and wrote notes in its margins; his copy survives in Seville. Columbus hoped to reach the lands of the Great Khan that Marco had described.

The book also helped create a lasting European image of the East as a place of fabulous wealth. Later travellers, including the Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta, wrote comparable accounts of the wider medieval world, but none had Marco Polo’s influence in Europe. Today his name is attached to Venice’s airport, to the wild Marco Polo sheep of the Pamirs, which he described and to countless books, films and television series.

Why it matters

Marco Polo’s years in Yuan China show how the Mongol empire connected Europe and East Asia in the 13th century. His book, for all its exaggerations, gave Europeans their first detailed picture of China and helped inspire the age of oceanic exploration that followed.