Marco Polo--Heroics or Hearsay?

Did librarian Frances Wood go too far when she suggested that one of history’s most famous travelers may not have gone far enough 700 years ago?

The thought crossed Wood’s mind when a distinguished Italian historian sidled up to her at a recent conference and archly predicted, “You will be killed.”

Trouble began when Wood published a slim volume with a teasing but incendiary title: “Did Marco Polo Go to China?” She thinks he did not, describing her hunt for Polo as “a medieval mystery story” masked by cobwebs of literary embroidery across seven centuries.

“I simply wanted to separate the man, and such facts that can be established, from the myth. I knew that Marco Polo was a household name, but I was unaware that millions of people all over the world felt passionately about him and would be baying for blood,” Wood said in her cluttered office at the British Library.

In challenging one of history’s great adventure stories, Wood’s book reflects long-standing academic doubts but has also captured popular imagination in both Europe and in China, catapulting her from reading room quiet to centerpiece of controversial seminars and talk shows.

Based on archival research across 20 years, Wood believes that the great traveler journeyed no further than Polo family trading posts thousands of miles west of China. Marco Polo was more adept at listening around the fire than tramping across terra incognita, she said. His book is mostly hearsay, Wood believes, although saying so has proved more incendiary than she ever imagined.

“I was amazed that people seemed aggressively upset and very predetermined to disagree. It surprised me because I always think that famous people are there to be looked at,” said the 48-year-old head of the Chinese department at the library.

To her delight--and occasional dismay--Wood has achieved what many historians seek: to make the past seem alive and important to a general audience.

Publication of her book flooded the library switchboard earlier this year with calls from journalists near and far. “It’s quite embarrassing if you work somewhere fairly quiet like a library and the switchboard is going berserk with calls from all of the world just for you.”

Challenging a Hero

Wood has outraged historians in Italy and in China, countries in which Polo is a hero. Venice named its airport after a beloved native son. There’s the Marco Polo bridge outside Beijing, and no tourist to the Chinese capital in the 1980s was ever allowed to miss the Marco Polo Carpet Shop at the Temple of Heaven. Across Asia, in tributaries of the storied Old Silk Road that linked West and East, Polo’s name beckons modern travelers to restaurants, hotels and souvenir shops.

By contrast, Wood’s hero-defiling has delighted Portuguese and Brazilian scholars.

“If Polo goes down, he takes Christopher Columbus with him, leaving the field to Portuguese explorers,” she said with a grin.

Columbus carried a Latin edition of Polo’s “Description of the World” with him to the New World. He scribbled notes in the margins but still got a wrong steer: Arriving in Cuba, Columbus, who was looking for India, believed that he had reached Japan.

In China, Wood found on a recent visit that even hotel workers knew who she was and why distinguished academics tut-tutted her passage. The workers would tease her: “Is this Marco Polo’s suitcase? His umbrella?”

A 55-year-old American wrote from Seattle to proclaim himself the first person since the 13th century to have retraced Polo’s journey from Venice to Beijing and to say he could refute all but one of Wood’s reservations.

“I sometimes think it’s a sort of male-female thing. For a lot of men, Marco Polo is a great hero they become attached to at the age of 6 or 7. If you question his role, they become terribly upset; as if you’re being rude about their grandfather,” Wood said one recent morning.

By training, her critics are quick to note, Wood is a Sinologist, not a historian. She has translated one novel from Chinese, and her four books about China include the exhaustive contemporary travelers’ standby, “The Blue Guide to China.”

Polo’s own pioneer guide to China, as schoolchildren have been taught for generations, introduced the East to the West as surely as Columbus’ voyages introduced the New World to the Old. Both, whatever their flaws, changed the shape of history.

Famous Travels

Probably written in 1298, scholars say, Polo’s account of his 24 years abroad, 17 of them supposedly in China, is said to have been dictated to a writer of romances named Rustichello while the two men were prisoners in Genoa after their capture in an obscure sea battle between Venetian and Genoese forces.

As the story goes, Polo’s father and uncle, both Venetian traders, journeyed east in about 1260, eventually meeting the great Mongol leader Kublai Khan. They returned to Venice but left again almost immediately, accompanied this time by teenage Marco. Arriving in Kublai’s capital as a “young stripling” of about 21, Polo impressed Kublai, who dispatched him to report on remote southern Chinese provinces he was conquering.

Polo “paid close attention to all the novelties and curiosities that came his way so that he might retell them to the Great Khan,” according to his book, which was a medieval version of a bestseller, widely translated and circulated in his own time--and ever since.

Rustichello, who wrote fiction for a living, probably embellished the story, scholars say; some fanciful editors over subsequent centuries certainly did, said Wood. Still, Polo’s travels stand as the first record by a European of the great Mongolian and Chinese civilizations.

Polo’s description of Kublai’s court, of porcelain and paper money, and of Chinese cities such as Beijing and Yangzhou has been read across centuries as an accurate, firsthand portrait of an astonishing civilization.

A Firm Disbeliever

Wood, emerging from an exercise in retrospective deduction, is a firm disbeliever.

“I don’t think Marco Polo ever went to China. When I’m feeling generous, I think his father and uncle might have gotten as far as Mongolia. But I don’t think Polo himself went much further than Constantinople [today’s Istanbul] and the Black Sea, where the family had trading posts,” she said.

Polo recounts his enduringly popular story in guidebook style and acknowledges that some descriptions are secondhand, but Wood believes that the whole thing might have been a retelling of tales he had heard or read in sources now lost, perhaps a Persian account.

“It’s a rather good fantasy, really, a bit like marrying a prince or something,” she said. “You stagger over there, and the emperor thinks you’re the best thing ever and gives you a wonderful job and looks after your father and uncle.”

Wood is troubled that Polo tends to get important facts wrong: He says he helped win a battle that took place long before he could have reached the city where it was fought, she said.

Neither, she added, does the Great Khan’s wandering reporter comment on hallmarks of Chinese life that startled later European visitors: tea, fishing with cormorants or the bound feet of women--all commonplace in 13th century China but unknown elsewhere. Polo offers no word of chopsticks or the Great Wall.

Nor does he appear in extensive Chinese archives from the crucial 1271-1295 period, Wood said. His passage left no ripple in official records, gazetteers or private journals in places he claims to have visited, and in some cases remained for substantial periods. He does not figure in thick volumes listing foreign experts who worked for the Mongols.

There’s bad news too for those weaned on the conviction that Polo introduced pasta, ravioli and ice cream to China, and those born knowing that he introduced noodles, dumplings and ice cream to Europe. Never happened, says Wood: “He simply forms a convenient bridge between two vastly different and distant civilizations, soaring over the crucial culinary crucible of Persia.”

The Polos claimed to be papal emissaries, but Wood says there is no trace of the family in Vatican archives “stuffed with letters, drafts, translations and missives going backward and forward between the khans and the popes.”

So Where Was He?

If Polo wasn’t in China, where was he? Wood doesn’t know, but her critics are quick to ask. Could he have spent two decades in Turkey without turning up in some document there?

In Italy, Polo is revered as the father of an audacious breed of literate sojourners who have carried Italian values--and trade goods--around the globe.

“Because he didn’t see certain things, it doesn’t mean that he didn’t go. I’ve been to New York and haven’t seen many things people have asked me if I’ve seen,” said Ugo Tucci, a retired professor of economic history at the University of Venice. Tucci said there is no reason the Chinese should have recorded the passage of every Italian merchant.

“Polo describes things he couldn’t have gotten secondhand,” said Tucci, who believes that Wood places too much literal burden on Polo’s text. He was a trader who sometimes got things garbled. So what? Tucci said it’s wrong to apply modern standards to medieval reports.

In Chinese eyes, Polo stands as the first important foreigner to broadcast the greatness of Chinese civilization to the Western World. “Their approach is that this questioning is absolutely all old hat: It’s all been said before,” said Wood.

In China, 80-year-old historian Yang Zhijiu, who has been defending Polo against canards foreign and domestic for more than half a century, told reporters that he will respond to Wood’s book even “if this next article might be my last.” Yang is waiting for a forthcoming Chinese translation. Japanese and German translations are in the works, and an American edition will be published by Westview Press this fall.

Amid continuing debate at home, Wood dangles between minefield and rose garden.

Literary critic Annette Kobak found “no convincing, let alone new evidence,” to support Wood’s views, while writer Noel Malcolm decried “a series of negative arguments appealing to nonexistent evidence.”

But David Trotter, a medieval linguist at Aberystwyth University in Wales, said that while Wood’s evidence is not conclusive, “I think one has to reevaluate [Polo’s] book as the definitive source.”

One apparently glaring case of Polo myopia, not noting the Great Wall, may be explained by the fact that it was probably not there at the time, said historian David O. Morgan: What the world today knows as the Great Wall was not built until about 300 years after Polo’s time.

Reinforcement

Still, Morgan applauded Wood for a book offering needed tonic to the self-absorption of historians “content merely to address each other in increasingly turgid and jargon-ridden language. All credit to Dr. Wood, for daring to present a real historical controversy in a form which successfully suggests it is both of importance and comprehensible to more than a tiny handful of specialists.”

Such reinforcement has been crucial for Wood amid pelting criticisms, she said. “Without it, I would really have found it very hard to take, because I wasn’t being too serious and I didn’t realize how seriously people would take the book,” Wood said.

Wood said she is now researching a comfortingly noncontroversial book about trading ports established by the great powers in a great Chinese civilization that, centuries before, Marco Polo never visited.

Montalbano is The Times’ London Bureau chief.