Marco Polo

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant who, by his own account, travelled to China with his father and uncle in 1271 and spent about seventeen years in the service of Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler of the Yuan dynasty. Back in Europe, as a prisoner of war in Genoa around 1298, he told his story to the writer Rustichello of Pisa, and their book, known in English as The Travels, gave Europeans one of their first detailed pictures of China. It describes Kublai’s capital, which Polo called Cambaluc (today’s Beijing), the empire’s paper money and postal relays, and above all the former Song capital Hangzhou, which he called Quinsai (also spelled Kinsay) and praised as the finest city in the world. Some historians have questioned whether he went to China at all, pointing to things the book never mentions, such as tea and the Great Wall, and to his absence from Chinese records. Most specialists today accept that he was there, while reading the book as a mix of what he saw, what he was told and what his co-author added.