Marco Polo
Marco Polo spent twenty-four years travelling to China and back and dictated the account in a Genoese prison. He was born in Venice about 1254 into a merchant family already trading in the Black Sea, and his father and uncle had reached the court of Kublai Khan once before and returned with a request for a hundred learned men and oil from the lamp of the Holy Sepulchre. They set out again in 1271 with Marco, aged about seventeen, two friars who turned back, and the oil. The journey took three and a half years overland through Persia, the Pamirs and the Taklamakan. He then spent some seventeen years in the Mongol service, by his own account as an envoy and administrator, travelling to Yunnan, Burma and the south-eastern coast — and it is the descriptions of what he saw on those missions that make the book useful: paper money, coal burned as fuel, the postal relay system, the size and wealth of Hangzhou, and the government of a Chinese empire by Mongols. The Polos left in 1292 escorting a princess by sea to Persia and reached Venice in 1295. He was captured in a war with Genoa and shared a cell with a writer of romances named Rustichello, who took it down in French. Contemporaries called it the Million and treated it as a collection of lies. Columbus owned a copy and annotated it. The book's accuracy is still argued about, and the omissions are the strongest case against him — no tea, no chopsticks, no bound feet, no Great Wall. Asked on his deathbed to recant his exaggerations, he is reported to have said that he had not told the half of what he saw.
- Lived: 1254 CE – 1324 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: explorer, writer
