January 7, 2024 marked 700 years since the death, in Venice, of Marco Polo (1254-1324), an illustrious merchant and adventurer from the city of the Doge, who pioneered the journey to Kublai Khan’s China. This was the same Khan memorialised in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which begins with the famous lines,
In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
For a quarter of a century, Polo travelled China, recording his travels in Il Milione, an account also known as Description of the World or Book of Wonders.
It’s a long and beautiful story. For many, though, Marco Polo is first encountered through modern retellings. He was one of my first heroes, and I discovered him through a comic book by Homer Fleming. I also remember later seeing a Hollywood film from the 1930s, in which Gary Cooper is the Venetian adventurer and Basil Rathbone is the bad guy; there is also an enlightened despot-type Kublai Kahn (George Barbier). Adaptations continue in this century; in 2014, Netflix began a series that lasted for two seasons.
The real story behind these myriad retellings is fascinating. More than that, though, in this time of cultural strife and tension between nations, it provides an example of an encounter between radically different civilizations that can serve as a model for us today.
Travelling in the West: Myth and Reality
In 1271, when Marco Polo was 17, his father and uncle set off on what was to be their second voyage to China, having returned from their first such trip two years before. This time, however, the young Marco joined them. They travelled across the Mediterranean to St. John of Acre. From there, by land, they passed through Syria, Mossul, Baghdad, Ormuz, and Persia; then the mountains of Indocuche and the Pamir; and then Mongolia, before entering China and going as far as what is now Beijing, then called Cambalique. It was the capital of the Katay and of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan.
Marco Polo’s Kublai Khan, it seems from history, was an illustrious ruler who received the Polos very well and sought to take advantage of the Venetians’ technical and scientific knowledge and their connections in Europe. On the Polos’ first trip, the Khan requested holy water and a hundred missionaries. On the second trip (Marco’s first), the travellers took two friars with them. It was with these friars that, after more than three years, the young adventurer arrived at Xanadu, Kublai Khan’s summer palace, later immortalised in Coleridge’s poem.
One of the oldest literary traditions in the West focuses on journeys at sea and in the known world. Ulysses returned from Troy to Ithaca, and Aeneas travelled from Troy and on to Rome. Those are mythical journeys, but there was nothing fictional about Marco Polo’s journey. Marco was a young entrepreneur, with the practical sense of a merchant from an aristocratic republic of merchants, where even the aristocrats in the Golden Book were involved in trade or were at least the descendants of men who were. The young Marco was intelligent and shrewd, quickly learning the local language and customs. He established a close, trusting relationship with Kublai Khan, even being appointed to a high position in the administration. The latter was somewhat reluctant to let them leave to return to Venice, for he appreciated their advice and services, especially those of the young Marco.
Finally, he permitted them to return with ships laden with riches. They sailed first to Sumatra, then India, landed in Aden, travelled overland to Constantinople, and from there returned to Venice. The Polos found it difficult to be recognised even in their hometown (they had been away for 24 years), but they were well received when they showed their patricians the large collection of precious stones that they had brought from China.
Around this time, Venice also fought a war with Genoa, and a naval battle in which the Venetians, commanded by Andrea Dandolo, were defeated. Marco Polo, a volunteer for his country, was taken prisoner. While in prison, in 1298, he is said to have dictated his adventures and travels to a friend, the writer Rustichello of Pisa. It was from there that the first written version of the ‘description of the world’ came.
In this way, Marco Polo’s travels remained a pioneering narrative of a European in the heart of Asia. It was an account of adventures and wonders from a time when the Portuguese opened up the great oceanic navigations and circumnavigated Africa on their way to India and the Far East. Crucially, Christopher Columbus himself read it.
An Italian-European Way of Looking at China
In the 20th century, as Western explorers climbed the great mountains of Asia, the merit of the Venetian’s intrepidity was recognised. Hollywood appropriated the adventurer and the adventure alike, but it tended to give the tale a paternalistic tone of the civilised West meeting the primitive East. This detracted from the real story of Marco Polo, who had the favour of the emperor and the greats and conveyed everything in terms of a dialogue of civilisations and of equals without such judgements. In the 1920s, as Laura de Giorgi observes in An Italian Hero for China: Reading Marco Polo in the Fascist Era, the Italian fascist regime used Marco Polo, his character, his biography, and his travels in order to present a Euro-Italian way of being in the world and in Asia—a way that was an alternative to the ‘arrogant and colonial English imperialist way’. The idea, though, was not original to fascism.
In 1892, the Regia Marina had launched a cruiser called the Marco Polo. And Italy had taken part in the international expedition against the Boxers and had even established a trading post in the harbour of Tianjin. As an explorer, friend, and confidant of the Asian leaders, the Italian-Venetian Marco Polo was a good fit for Mussolini’s Italy as a symbol of another way of looking at China and Asia, especially one that was different from Anglo-Saxon imperialism. Chiang Kai Shek’s authoritarian and nationalist China was not ideologically so foreign to fascism; in fact, Il Duce’s own son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, had been the embassy’s first secretary there in 1927, before becoming consul in Shanghai, and then minister plenipotentiary in Beijing. And in 1933, the Institute for the Middle and Far East (IMEO) was inaugurated in Rome, headed by none other than Giovaanni Gentile, the regime’s number one intellectual and thinker. It was Gentile who spoke at the inauguration of the “ancient and ever-present Orient of which an audacious and genial Italian merchant, an admirable author of ingenuity and prudence, was the first to write in the West.”
The Italian regime, in the same way that it had sought out Imperial Rome as the ancestor of Fascist Italy, was seeking out the Venetian adventurer for its pantheon. Moreover, it used Polo as a model of the ‘good European,’ contrasting him with the Anglo-Saxon colonialists of the Opium Wars and the Iniquitous Treaties. All of this would come to an end, however, when Imperial Japan invaded China in July 1937 and the game of alliances, via Berlin, would throw Rome into Tokyo’s arms.
Today, after the Silk Routes—and with China coming to the West—there is nothing more timely than remembering this pioneering meeting of civilisations. Though Marco Polo and Kublai Khan were men from profoundly different cultures and backgrounds, they developed a genuine friendship and learnt from each other—and from each other’s civilizations. Instead of showing hostility, they allowed themselves to be surprised by one another, demonstrating not only their wisdom, but also true admiration and friendship.
