Marco Polo

In the West one figure in particular has become synonymous with the Silk Road, Marco Polo. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Polo emerged in Europe and North America as a figure of popular history, with his story depicted in a variety of fascinating ways across film, journalism, travel writing and literature.

The son of a Venetian merchant, Marco set off for Asia with his father and uncle in 1271. Together they would travel more than twenty thousand kilometers over a twenty-four year period. Upon return to Venice Polo was taken captive by the Genoese during a sea battle and imprisoned. There his fellow inmate, Rustichello of Pisa wrote an account of his voyage, and multiple translations helped the manuscript quickly gain attention across Europe. Readers were given an evocative picture of Mongol life and Kublai Khan’s embattled relations with China on the basis of Polo’s extended stays in his court. At some point the original manuscript was lost. Despite this, Nigel Cliff has suggested that The Travels - arguably the most famous travelogue of all time - “stands as the book that revealed the East to the West and formed Europe’s idea of Asia.” John Larner has also traced its reception through the centuries. In the 1300s The Travels was viewed as a tale of wonders, but subsequently came to be recognized for the geographical insights it offered on Asia, inspiring, among others, Christopher Columbus. Larner informs us that at different points the text fell out of favor, but was subsequently revived in the nineteenth century, achieving “cult status as a work of scholarly and romantic interest.” For Sinologists The Travels has been a particularly valuable source, with Paul Pelliot among those citing it to interpret histories of connection within and across Central Asia. In Britain, Polo’s reputation and popularity was further enhanced through Henry Yule’s 1871 translation; a text that added new maps and garnered a prestigious Royal Geographic Society award.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Polo became a key reference for a number of travel writers, helping to create images of lands unknown, of pioneering travel, and of discovering the peoples of Asia. His steps were there to be “retraced” on both map and in person. Sweeping arcs - traced on paper and animated in the new medium of film - connected continents to create a vista of male adventure. National Geographic published a number of articles on China and Central Asia, wherein Polo was cited as the archetypal reference of grand adventure. In 1927, for example, William Morden explained how he “first brought word” of the Pamirs to Europe. The following year, J. R. Hildebrand dedicated an entire article to The World’s Greatest Overland Explorer at the same time as Broadway was staging Marcos Millions. Unlike the first-hand travelogues common to this period, Hildebrand’s article was a condensed interpretation of The Travels. It included images of local landscapes and scenes of domestic life, with a text that connected 1920s Georgia, Persia and China to Polo’s thirteenth century text through the familiar trope of an unchanging Orient. For the portrait of a man identified as a Kurd, the addition of a caption “A Pirate of the Persian Plains” was justified because he “comes of a race that holds a world-endurance record for fighting and longevity…. Marco Polo called the Kurds ‘an evil generation, whose delight is to plunder merchants’.”

By the late 1930s Polo was being picked up by Hollywood, albeit through some painfully Orientalist depictions of Asia. In 1938 Goldwyn released The Adventures of Marco Polo, and as the academics Iannucci and Tulk point out in their study of Polo’s modern day depictions, the film presented East and West through the cliches of “civilized and primitive, active and passive, noble and wicked, male and female, dominant and submissive.” He was presented as a conquering lover, seducing and saving “the passive eastern female.” The film was thus a great example of how modern depictions of The Travels could be guilty of dissolving the cultural and historical diversities of Asia into a seamless geography of romantic adventure. For Hollywood, this quintessential story of journeying east through “the Orient” started in the Holy Lands, and stretched across to the mountains of Tibet and plains of Mongolia and China beyond.

Fascinatingly, World War II and the Cold War would also shape the ways in which his story was told on film, stage and even within children’s cartoons. In 1953 Xanadu: The Marco Polo Musical toured military and civilian theaters in Germany, Austria and Italy. Songs from the play were also rebroadcast on the American Forces Network radio service over a number of years. In 1962 L’adventura di un italiano in Cina was made as a coproduction involving five countries and distributed internationally under the titles La Fabuleuse Avventure de Marco Polo and Marco the Magnificent. The idea of a demonic East reached children’s entertainment via Marco Polo Junior Versus the Red Dragon. This Australian made fantasy animation told the story of a distant descendant of Polo and his task of slaying a red dragon in time to rescue the princess. A few years later the Hong Kong kung fu industry took Polo’s story in the direction of flagrant blood spilling. A production of the famed Shaw Brothers, Marco Polo told the story of assassination attempts on Kublai Khan and the Italian visitor’s role in protecting the court. Elaborate fight scenes reproduced the stereotype of a noble West and violent East, and commercial success came with the film marketed internationally under the title The Four Assassins.

An entirely different depiction of Polo’s travels came in 1982 via an acclaimed American-Italian coproduction for television. Still available on DVD on eBay, this slow moving, four part mini series offers a detailed depiction of the tensions between Polo’s father and uncle and a Venetian Senate who see little point in supporting a trip to a land of “blood thirsty savages”. Polo is carefully portrayed as the archetypal cosmopolitan, comfortable in intercultural settings and well equipped to mollify the suspicions of both Venice’s most powerful catholics and the court of Kublai Khan. Much of the series pivoted around the relationship between the Great Khan and Polo; one built upon their shared interest in other worlds and a tolerance for different religions and a strong sense of fairness. Here again then we see the ideals of free thought and the journey that only an open mind can take being trumpeted as the lesson of history, and the real legacy of The Travels; all themes that had a particular resonance at the height of the Cold War.

As the images here illustrate, Polo’s story continues to inspire screen writers and authors. In the early 2010s Netflix produced one of the most expensive television series ever made, filming Marco Polo in Hungary, Italy, Kazakstan, Malaysia and Slovakia. Although reception for the series was somewhat unenthusiastic, the production team received an award from the President of Mongolia for the positive image it projected globally of Mongolian culture.

Polo has also become a metaphor for analyzing the geopolitical future of Eurasia. In 2018 renowned relations author Robert Kaplan proclaimed the region was entering an era of weakened state power and fading empires, wherein borders were receding and the Westphalian model of states in competition was becoming less relevant. In the coming decades, Kaplan argued, the political map of the region will look more like “medieval times”, such that we are witnessing the “return of Marco Polo’s world”. In an essay first written for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, Kaplan cites Laurence Bergreen’s description of Polo’s travels across a “complex, tumultuous, and menacing, but nonetheless porous” Eurasia as the precise lens through which we should interpret the region’s geopolitical future. Kaplan thus concludes, “in all of this, the geopolitical characteristics of Marco Polo’s world roughly approximate our own”. Marco Polo thus stands in for the world of the Silk Road (read Belt and Road), which, he suggests, “provides as good an outline as any for defining the geopolitics of Eurasia in the coming era.”