H-ASIA
Date:  April 30, 1997
**************************************************************
Wood, Frances. Did Marco Polo Go To China? London: Martin Secker & Warburg,
Ltd., 1995; Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. xii + 188 pages.

reviewed by James M. Hargett
The University at Albany - State University of New York


     Just how reliable is Marco Polo's account of China? Did he actually
reach the Middle Kingdom? Numerous scholars - Frances Wood now among them -
have raised serious questions about the veracity of the Venetian merchant's
guidebook. These challenges are based on three general varieties of omission.
First, no external source - Chinese or otherwise - can confirm Marco Polo's
presence in China (nor is there anything to prove that he was anywhere
else!). Second, there are a number of notable and surprising lacunae in
Description of the World. For instance, there is no mention of tea,
calligraphy, chopsticks, footbinding, or the Great Wall (how could Marco Polo
have missed the Great Wall during his seventeen-year stay in China?). Third,
Polo's account gives few details about the actually journey itself.  He says
next to nothing about his traveling companions, what he ate, where he stayed,
how he communicated with people on the road, and so on.  The general
impersonal and detached nature of the text, which is full of all sorts of
geographical and chronological gaps and inconsistencies (as incredible as it
may seem, during his stay in China, Polo failed to pick up even a few Chinese
or Mongolian place names!), has also stimulated much controversy. So why deal
with Marco Polo and his book at all? The answer to this question is simple:
Description of the World has had a tremendous influence on Western attitudes
about China over the last 500 years. It cannot be ignored.

Did Marco Polo Go To China? is a well-organized and well-written book. Here
is a list of chapter headings: (1) The bare details (background on the Polo
family's travels, how the book came to be written, and so on, based on
information in the Prologue). (2) Why go at all? (3) Missionaries nose to
tail. (4) Prester John and the Magi (Prester John was thought to be a pious
Christian ruler of the East). (5) Not an itinerary. (6) The ghost writer and
the first fan. (7) The language of the text. (8) Omissions and inclusions.
(9) Ice-cream and spaghetti. (10) Walls within walls. (11) He missed the
biggest wall. (12) Not unique and certainly not a siege engineer. (13) Who
were the Polos? (14) Was it China? (15) A significant absence. Conclusions.

Wood's conclusions are not surprising (many of her predecessors, especially
Paul Pelliot, A.C. Moule, and Herbert Franke, have already tackled most of
these same controversies and reached similar conclusions). Simply put, we
know practically nothing about Marco Polo, little about how his book came to
be written, and even less about his contribution to Description of the World.
While the details in the Prologue concerning the first business trip of
Maffeo Polo (Marco's father) and Niccolo Polo (his uncle) and to the Crimea
and Constantinople (arriving there in 1260) seem credible, their second trip
(supposedly with Marco) to China (leaving in 1271 and returning in 1295)
"seems unlikely, even allowing for exaggeration" (p. 149). If this is the
case - and Wood makes a convincing argument, then where did Marco Polo get
his information about China? According to Wood (and her predecessors), the
Polo family's connections in the Near East and beyond "could have provided
much material." A likely source, we are told, is Persian guidebooks, maps and
histories, available in Crimea and Constantinople, which were written to
facilitate travel and trade in areas to the East. Although the author
concludes that Marco Polo himself probably never traveled much further beyond
the family's trading posts on the Black Sea and Constantinople, Description
of the World still remains a valuable source of information on China and the
Near East. Just two examples would be Polo's description of Beijing under
Mongol rule and his useful reports on paper money, porcelain, and coal.

Non-specialists have never had access to a convenient, non-technical, and
balanced discussion of the various "problems" with Marco Polo's guidebook.
That situation has now changed with the publication of Did Marco Polo Go To
China? In my view, the greatest contribution of Frances Wood's book is this:
it demonstrates that we - especially those of us who teach about Marco Polos
- must approach Description of the World in more critical ways. Yes - Marco
Polo's text is a good example of the type of world geography book that became
popular in the fourteenth century. And, yes - it was the curiosities
described in such works that inspired many of the great voyages undertaken
during the Age of Discovery, including those of Christopher Columbus (he
carried a copy of Description with him to the New World). At the same time,
however, we must admit that much in Marco Polo's account is the product of
dubious origin. Legends such as "Marco Polo returned to Italy with recipes
for ice cream and pasta" must be challenged (why can't we admit that Arab
influence seems to be responsible for both Chinese noodles and Italian
pasta?). Legends such as "the Polos helped the Mongols build mangonels (a
military apparatus used to hurl heavy stones and other missiles) that made it
possible for them to take Xiangyang" must be challenged (the siege there was
broken a year before the Polos supposedly arrived in China). Should we not
also tell students that Description was actually penned by  a "romance
writer" named Rustichello, who was Marco Polo's cellmate in prison? And
should we not also tell students that the Marco Polo legend was in large part
created by a storyteller-publisher named Giovanni Battista Ramusio (d. 1557)?
A critical approach that attempts to distinguish between fact and hearsay
will help all of us, I think, avoid the kind of stereotyping that has
produced - and continues to produce - so much ignorance and misunderstanding
in the West about China and Chinese civilization.

 Finally, in her "Afterward to the American Edition" (pp. 153-55), Frances
Wood expresses some regret at not having devoted more attention to the early
manuscripts and printed editions of Description of the World, and that
treatment of such material "need not present a barrier to popular enjoyment"
(pp. 153-54).  I could not agree more. There is an inherent fallacy in
discussing "omissions" in modern versions of Description. This is because
modern editions have been cobbled together from a great variety of versions.
For instance, Marco Polo's famous passage about "Christians" in Fuzhou (who
were actually Manicheans) appears first in a fifteenth-century edition (the
famous "Toledo manuscript"), more than a hundred years after Marco Polo's
death! Indeed, Wood's chapter "The ghost writer and the first fan" (39-48) is
especially useful because she discusses the various circumstances (texts
written in different languages and dialects, copies made from copies, and so
on) that have led to the extreme variation in surviving versions of the book
(these range chronologically from 1351 to the nineteenth century). In fact,
it seems highly likely that many of the earliest and most influential
versions were "improved" by adding material from "elsewhere"! Not
surprisingly, some of these interpolations include famous passages (such as
Marco Polo's detailed description of Hangzhou).  Clearly, the question of
textual transmission is one of the most vexing aspects of Marco Polo's book
and travels. Perhaps Frances Wood could say more on this subject in a future,
expanded edition of her excellent book?

James M. Hargett
Department of East Asian Studies
The University at Albany-State University of New York
Humanities 210
Albany, NY 12222
USA
E-mail: hargett@cnsvax.albany.edu
=================================================================
   To post to  H-ASIA  simply send your message to
                    H-ASIA@h-net.msu.edu
   For vacations send message to    listserv@h-net.msu.edu
     on message line type    set h-asia nomail
     upon return simply type   set h-asia mail
                    HOMEPAGE
         http://h-net.msu.edu/~asia/
          New Members: Remember to introduce yourself.

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS