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Marco Polo's travels retain their allure
A biography revives the awe his account of China inspired.
By David Walton, Special to the Times
Published November 11, 2007
For those who love biographies, Laurence Bergreen is a most satisfying writer, with an unerring sense of what a reader wants to learn about a subject. His latest, Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, is richly detailed and illuminating, a window into the most exotic of places and times. Why retell Marco Polo's Travels, one of literature's wonders? In 1271, Polo, then 17, journeyed with his father and uncle across Asia to the court of Kublai Khan, as remote from Europeans then as Mars is today. Getting there took three years. Polo's account of crossing what was later called the Silk Road and of the splendors of Mongol China is a masterpiece of storytelling. To hold his account to today's standards of historiography sounds like a bath of cold water. However, we live in an age of verification, and it turns out, despite his "tendency to embellish," a good portion of Polo's narrative proves true. Kublai was the grandson of Genghis Khan, the Mongol conqueror whose nomadic cavalrymen wreaked devastation across Asia. Polo claimed that 20,000 of Genghis' issue were then living in privilege - and he seems to have been correct. "One in twelve Asian men - that is, one in every two hundred men world-wide - carries a cluster of Y chromosomes originating in Mongolia at the time of Genghis Khan." The danger for Kublai Khan was that he'd adapted too freely to the classic Chinese imperial style and become "yet another invader conquered by his more sophisticated and civilized subjects." Celebrated in Coleridge's great poem, Kublai did have his Xanadu, more amazing than either author guessed. A marble palace that enclosed 16 miles of park, Xanadu could be dismantled and moved just like any Mongol tent. Today the world of Marco Polo - European and Asian - is as remote as Mongol China for his time. You'll read this fascinating book with many emotions, but more than anything with relief - thankful for not having lived in the 1200s. David Walton is a writer in Pittsburgh. Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu By Laurence Bergreen Knopf, $27.95, 448 pages
[Last modified November 7, 2007, 17:46:04]
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