In 1271, seventeen-year-old Marco Polo left Venice with his father and uncle on a journey that would last twenty-four years and cover over 15,000 miles. Their destination was the court of Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan and ruler of the largest contiguous empire in history. The route took them across Persia, over the Pamir Mountains, through the Taklamakan Desert, and along the Silk Road to the Khan's summer palace at Shangdu — Coleridge's Xanadu.
Kublai Khan took a liking to the young Venetian and employed him as an envoy and administrator for seventeen years. Marco travelled to regions no European had seen: Yunnan, Burma, Bengal, the coast of Southeast Asia, and possibly the remote provinces of Tibet. He described paper money, coal burning, the imperial postal system, and a canal network that made China's infrastructure vastly superior to Europe's.
Returning to Venice in 1295, Marco was captured during a naval battle with Genoa and dictated his account to a fellow prisoner, the romance writer Rustichello da Pisa. Il Milione — "The Travels of Marco Polo" — was an instant sensation and an instant controversy. Readers mocked the numbers: millions of people, thousands of bridges, rivers wider than any European waterway. They called him "Marco Millions" for his exaggerations.
Modern scholarship has largely vindicated Polo. Details in his account — the salt production at Changlu, the configuration of Kublai's hunting parties, the design of Chinese ships — match Chinese and Persian sources too precisely to be invented. On his deathbed in 1324, friends begged him to retract the tall tales. "I have not told half of what I saw," he replied. The East he described was simply too vast for medieval Europe to imagine.
