Marco Polo didn't get to China

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Marco Polo Did n't Make It To China (Original edition Did Marco Polo go to China? ) Is a book from 1995 by the British scientist Frances Wood . It deals with the inconsistencies of the travelogue and the seventeen-year stay of Marco Polo in China Khublai Khan . The book sparked some rather critical voices in the professional world.

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Doubts about the veracity of the "description of the world"

The return of the three polos (Maffeo, Niccolo and Marco) to Venice, described in the prologue to the Divisament dou Monde (description of the world), does not agree with other reports in the book: In ragged clothes without luggage (only with many precious stones sewn into the garment) if they have arrived - extensive notes of the trip that Marco Polos brought with him are later written.

Some astonishing gaps in the description are mentioned by Wood. For example, the Chinese script is not mentioned:

“Even a traveler who had nothing to do with state administration would have found it difficult to overlook the Chinese script. It can hardly be imagined that in a country where paper was invented and the written word was shown more reverence than anywhere else, a person - even if it was a foreigner - could claim to have worked in the administration of the state, but to have not noticed the Mongolian and Chinese writing systems or to have considered them to be of little interest. "

His name is not mentioned in any of the many carefully written Chinese annals, although he is said to have been a close confidante of the Great Khan. According to his own claim, Marco Polo was governor of Yangzhou for three years , a city he only knows to report that harnesses are made there:

"That's all there is to say."

The Great Wall of China , which he should have crossed according to his stated travel route, is also not mentioned.

"Even if the Great Wall was left to decay and no repairs took place, there would still have been enough walls of tamped earth to be seen in the 13th century, and hardly anyone who traveled to China from the west could have missed them."

The constriction of women's feet common in China , the use of chopsticks and the Chinese tea culture are not mentioned.

Its geographical information is usually very detailed, but not always comprehensible - also when it comes to descriptions of places. For example, he gives incorrect information about the so-called Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing, where he incorrectly describes the number of bridge arches and the pillar decorations.

The conquest of the city of Xiangyang (1267–1273) allegedly made possible by the Polos through the construction of catapults cannot be correct because the Polos could not have been in China at that time and, according to Chinese chronicles, these machines were made by the Persian engineers Ismail and Ala al -Din were built.

Attempts to explain

Although Frances Wood takes the view in the text that Marco Polo has very likely not got further than the Black Sea - to Sudak , where the Polo family presumably owned a trading post - she nonetheless quotes dissenting opinions in her book. Above all, Professor Yang Zhi-Jiu from Beijing tried since 1941 to explain the inconsistencies in the description . The tea was an uninteresting drink for an Italian, who mostly lived among Mongols in China, and the constricted feet were not practiced by the Mongols either. Marco Polo could possibly only have come to Beijing and his inspection trips on behalf of the Great Khan would not have taken place. Not mentioning the Great Wall is no reason to reject the entire description .

The original, allegedly written during the captivity of war in Genoa after the sea ​​battle at Curzola (1298) with the help of the novelist Rustichello da Pisa , has been lost; the copies or adaptations in many languages ​​(with some essential additions), currently around 150, show strong differences.

For example, due to transcription and / or translation errors ( concerning his alleged activity as governor of Yangzhou) the word “sejourna” (residence) became “governa” (to govern), Polo had been there, but not as a high official.

Critical reviews

The historian David Morgan finds no compelling arguments in Wood's work to doubt the description of the world .

Another historian, Stephen G. Haw, does not believe that Polo's report is pieced together from other sources, noting that Wood's approach of not finding any mention of Marco Polo in Chinese texts is contestable because it happened that Europeans in China often unite Chinese or Mongolian names would have been adopted or given.

The Italian Igor de Rachewiltz criticizes sharply:

"[...] that the book by Frances Wood does not meet the standards one would expect in a work of this kind. […] The questions asked have already been answered satisfactorily in most cases […] Your main arguments cannot stand up to close scrutiny. Your conclusion does not take into account all of the evidence supporting Marco Polo's credibility. "

Marina Münkler also notes:

“Frances Wood tried to summarize the objections raised in her recently published book Marco Polo came not as far as China to the thesis that Marco Polo was not in China at all, but his report mainly from Persian-Arabic sources, u. a. from Rashid al-Din's world history and from Ibn Battuta's travelogue . [...] The thesis did not find approval in the first reviews of the book [...] of course [...]. "

In 1997 Benjamin Colbert wrote rather neutrally in the foreword to a new English edition of Die Reisen:

"In our more empirical times, Polo's matter has received increasing scrutiny, as the title of a recent study by Frances Wood evidences: 'Did Marco Polo go to China?' Accumulated historical and geographical documents allow us now to compare Polo's data with reliable contemporary accounts, not only of travelers, but of medieval Chinese officials as well. "

expenditure

  • Frances Wood: Did Marco Polo go to China? Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., London 1995, ISBN 978-0-436-20384-8 (English original edition).
    • Frances Wood: Marco Polo did not get to China , R.Piper, Munich 1996, ISBN 3-492-03886-7 (German translation by Barbara Reitz and Bernhard Jendricke).

Individual evidence

  1. Wood: Marco Polo… , pp. 7–8, 62–63.
  2. Wood: Marco Polo ... , p. 99.
  3. Wood: Marco Polo ... , pp. 184-190.
  4. ^ Ronald Latham: Marco Polo: The Travels , Harmondsworth, 1958, p. 206.
  5. Wood: Marco Polo ... , p. 142.
  6. Wood: Marco Polo ... , pp. 100-104.
  7. Wood: Marco Polo ... , pp. 121–124.
  8. Wood: Marco Polo ... , pp. 150–152, 185.
  9. Yang Zhi-Jiu: Makeboluo zai Zhongguo = Marco Polo in China 马可波罗 在 中国 / [杨志 玖 著]. Tianjin shi: Nan kai da xue chu ban she, 1999, ISBN 7-310-01276-3 .
  10. Wood: Marco Polo ... , pp. 191–194.
  11. Wood: Marco Polo ... , pp. 58–70.
  12. Wood: Marco Polo ... , p. 185.
  13. David O. Morgan: Marco Polo in China - Or Not , in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , July 1996, Vol. 6, Issue 2, p. 224
  14. Marco Polo's China , by Stephen G. Haw.
  15. Stephen G. Haw (2006), Marco Polo's China: a Venetian in the Realm of Kublai Khan , London & New York: Routledge, p. 173, ISBN 0-415-34850-1 .
  16. ^ Igor de Rachewiltz, “Marco Polo Went to China,” Zentralasiatische Studien 27 (1997), pp. 34–92.
  17. Marina Münkler: Experience of the foreign: The description of East Asia in the eyewitness accounts of the 13th and 14th centuries , Walter de Gruyter, 2017, ISBN 978-3-05-007855-7 ; P. 252, footnote 104.
  18. "In our more empirical times, Polo's issue has received increasing attention, as evidenced by the title of a recent study by Frances Wood: 'Did Marco Polo Go to China?' Summarized historical and geographic documents now allow us to compare Polo's data with reliable contemporary reports, not only from travelers but also from medieval Chinese officials. ”
    Benjamin Colbert: Marco Polo, The Travels . Translation W. Marsden, T. Wright. Introduction Benjamin Colbert. Herts: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1997, ISBN 978-1-85326-473-3 . S. VI