Did Marco Polo Tell the Truth? There is a controversy abo

Did Marco Polo Tell the Truth?
   Good morning, everyone. Today I’d like to discuss briefly about the travels of Marco Polo. If you ask his 13th-century contemporaries, "Did Marco Polo tell the truth ?" the answer would be a resounding no. They expected visitors to the unknown East to bring back tales of people born with one leg or one eye, or with the head beneath the shoulders. However, Polo’s 1298 book, The Travels of Marco Polo, offered no such oddities. Instead, it told Europeans something they refused to believe. The civilization of the West, Polo implied, was second-rate. China, by contrast, was a country with hundreds of thriving towns and cities far richer in goods, services, and technology than any place in Europe.
   But rather than reject Polo’s account, Westerners embraced it—as a romantic fantasy. It became Europe’s most widely read book, thanks to such details as Polo’s description of China’s Kublai Khan as the world’s strongest leader, a chivalrous "Lord of Lords" who employed 10,000 falconers and 20,000 dog handlers and hosted banquets with 40,000 guests. In 1324, as Polo lay on his deathbed, a priest beseeched him to retract his "fables". His reply: "I have not told half of what I saw."
   Now seven centuries later, Polo’s credibility again is under attack. According to critics, he never even set foot in China. Had he been there, they argue, he would have reported important aspects. of 13th-century Chinese life that went unmentioned. Among his omissions: tea drinking, calligraphy, the binding of women’s feet to keep them small, and, most glaring, the Great Wall of China.
   The controversy bubbled up in a 1995 book-- Did Marco Polo Go to China?—by Frances Wood, head of the British Library’s Chinese department. Wood notes Polo’s omissions and argues that he probably never got beyond Persia. His China stay, she suggests, was invented with the help of Arabs and Persians who had visited China. She also points out that Polo is not mentioned in any Chinese records. But if past is prologue, Polo’s reputation will emerge in fine shape. A century after he was ridiculed as "the man of a million lies," a Renaissance geographer  hailed him as "the most diligent investigator of eastern shores. "Another reader, Christopher Columbus, sailed west in hopes of finding a better route to the riches Polo described in the East.
   Today, reference books state flatly that Polo went to China, even though flaws in his story have been known for centuries. In 1747, the British book Astley’s Voyages asked: "Had our Venetian been really on the Spot ... how is it possible he could have made not the least mention of the Great Wall: the most remarkable thing in ’all China or perhaps in the whole world?" The answer, Polo’s supporters say, is simple: In his day, the Great Wall wasn’t all that great. First built 300 years before the birth of Christ, much of it had crumbled by the 13thcentury. "Almost everything the tourist is normally shown today was built in the 16th century, ’ notes historian John Lamer, author of the new book Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World.
   Tea time? Lamer also downplays other omissions. Tea drinking was popular in southern China in Polo’s time, he says, but was not yet so popular in the north and central regions, where Polo resided. Foot binding, Lamer reports, was limited "to upper-class ladies ... confined to their houses. "Only rarely would anyone see them except kin.
   While Polo said nothing about calligraphy, he did tell the West about paper money, which China had used for centuries.  From Polo, the West learned of China’s "large black stones which ... burn away like charcoal. "Centuries later, Europeans would come to know the substance as coal. Polo also told quite a few lies. Although he never visited Japan, he reported its royal palace roofed in gold. He claimed to have been Kublai Khan’s military adviser in a Chinese siege that occurred, it turns out, before his reported time in China. In fact, Polo may have done much less for the khan than he claimed. Perhaps that’s why Chinese records ignore him.
   But even Polo’s No. 1 critic, Wood, deems him a useful "recorder of information". Whether he told only half of what he saw, or saw merely half of what he told, the fact remains: He made history happen.