Writing the first best-selling travel book

Over the Silk Road to China, shippers and wholesalers customarily traded goods only

to the next trader down the way, so that no one trader or camel driver covered the

entire, exhausting route. Thirteenth century-traveler Marco Polo’s father and uncle

were more ambitious than most other traders in Venice: They traveled all the way

from Italy to China in their quest for lucrative deals.

Marco’s elders were on their second trip to the Far East when they invited the young

man (probably about 19 at the time) to tag along. The trio arrived in Beijing in 1275.

According to the book that Marco Polo later wrote, he entered Emperor Kublai Khan’s

diplomatic service and traveled to other Mongol capitals on official business. (Kublai

Khan, though China’s emperor, was a Mongol.)

Almost two decades went by. Young Polo, not quite so young anymore, finally left

China in 1292 and returned to Venice. But the rival city-states were at war, and Marco

Polo was captured. He was in a Genoa prison when he wrote, or rather dictated to a

fellow prisoner, the story of his fantastic years abroad, The Travels of Marco Polo.

Many of Marco Polo’s contemporaries thought he lied in his book, and some

modern scholars think they were right and that Polo at least exaggerated his

story. But that doesn’t undercut the impact of his descriptions. Polo’s book was

about such a faraway place, and to Europeans at the turn of the fourteenth

century, it was like a dispatch from outer space. At the very least, Polo’s stories

spread and fed the perception that China was the trader’s mother lode. The

Travels of Marco Polo was the most influential book of its time

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