Essential Travelogue, could have been better presented
I have read this book while traveling in China by train. It is a very interesting description of past times, and essential reading for those interested in historical geography. Several points need to be clarified, though. First Marco Polo is not what one would call today an âaeunbiased observerâ. He traveled on the trips he wrote about while being employed as an emissary for the Mongols, and his admiration for the Mongol regime shows throughout. People and civilizations are judged by their proximity to the Mongol Khan. The point of view of the Chinese and other victims of Mongols is completely absent.

Second, Marco Polo was obsessed with power, money, prostitution, and religion. Most of his descriptions center about these things, to the neglect of other aspects of human life. He divides the cities he encounters upon religious lines, even in places like China where the inhabitants themselves werenâ(tm)t aware or didnâ(tm)t care about such divisions. His admiration for Christianity and his contempt for Buddhism (whom he erroneously associates with idol worship) shows through. He often writes as if drunken with admiration for Mongol power, praising the Khan for massacring entire cities, while at the same time labeling peaceful people as âaepusillanimousâ.

Having said that, these travelogues are still interesting to read. The short-chapter format is very well-suited to reading in the bathroom. The translation by William Marsden is very well-done and easy to read. However, my edition (Wordsworth Editions, 1997) could be improved in several ways. A map for instance showing the route of his travels would go a long way assisting the reader to follow along. Otherwise one has to reconstruct the places from the crude narrative (âaeand then we traveled 3 days by camel heading East, then turned to left and walked 1 day â¦â). Frankly, quite often I had no clue about which location he was writing. So I ended up copying a map from a history book and pasting it inside the back cover. Still one desires a more detailed map, with marks designating locations chapter by chapter.

Another desperately needed improvement is a translation table. Many of the place names he used had long been ignored and replaced with new place names. In my edition there is one page glossary of place names, but that is far from adequate. For example, the glossary only translates 5 place names in China, leaving dozens other names in oblivion, and leaving me wondering whether the city of Kin-Sai, the one Marco Polo praises the most and devotes the most pages to, is modern-day SuZhou or HangZhou. This is an important deficiency that needs to be corrected. Whatever edition you decide to buy, make sure first that it has a good map and a good glossary of names!

Barely believable adventures.
A very remarkable book written in the 13th century. Many secrets were reviled when Marco returned. And may interesting explanations of things like the origin of cinnamon.

Marco writes well enough of his travels and you feel that you are there. You can actually follow the trail if you have a map. He describes the flora and fauna of each region and describes the economics and industry of the region.

Example: "The women of the superior class are in like manner free from superfluous hairs; their skins are fare, and they are well formed."

It is interesting to see how little has changed from Marco Polo's 13th century and now.

Marco's journey
Marco Polo purportedly spent 17 years travelling to the courts of Kublai Khan and, as an emissary for Kublai Khan, then throughout the Far East. Whether it actually happened or not is up for debate. I went into this text with an open mindset and have accepted that Marco Polo did indeed go on this trip with his father and uncle, but not to the extent as surmised. Instead he travelled and added stories he collected from traders and others to fill in gaps or points of interest to him. The book is broken into four sections now. Part One is his trip to the Great Khan's courts in Cathay (China). Part Two is his travels throughout the provinces of Cathay. Part Three concerns going to Japan, Southern India, and the Islands of the Indian Sea (Java, etc). Part Four is travelling into the 'northern countries' (Russia, etc).

In general, Polo gives very brief descriptions of most regions, accounting for their religious beliefs, money used, fealty to the Great Khan Kublai. There's some intriguing customs (visitors will be taken into a home and the man of the house leaves until they are gone but the visitor has full access to the household including the wives, daughters, sisters, nieces), talks of cannibalism, dress, unfamiliar animals they encountered, and contributes to the whole messy history of Prestor John. It does get repetitive and dry after a while. Polo's talk of Kublai Khan is almost obsessive and he was obviously completely enamoured of this new culture. Overall, it was fascinating to read although I had to push myself through some parts due to repetitive descriptions. Any history buff should read this story about one of the purported most well-travelled explorers ever, not to mention he was possibly the biggest best-selling authors before the printing press was invented.

You are going where?
I believe I got what I paid for. There were much better books of great detail, but they cost much more. I would suggest saving your money until you can buy a much more comprehensive book. The reading and information provided in the book was light and was gone over very fast. I question some of the facts contained there in.

The Size of the World
It has been a pleasure to revisit the travels of Marco Polo. I was transfixed by these stories of travel and adventure when I was a child, and never questioned the veracity of the narrative. I know today that the narrative has been corrupted over the centuries, that "The Travels" can scarcely be used as an historical reference, and that a more tantalizing and complete manuscript has probably been lost to the ages. Still, there are glimpses and insights within the narrative that could only have come from first-hand experience, and these describe an enormous, exotic world that titillates even today, while readers in the 13th and 14th centuries must have been enthralled.

I was most keen this time around to Polo's descriptions of the cultures and wildlife he encountered, of the whales and lions and leopards and bears--he even describes a white bear, and the people who hunted it were surely of the group often called Eskimos. He describes dog-sledding in the far north and the cannibalistic practices of the people of Java far to the south, both of which are extant in our current era. There are also the fascinating observations of the Mongol Empire, of that group of nomadic people who somehow rose up, like an event in an Isaac Asimov novel, to conquer much of the known world.

Somewhat depressingly, though, are Polo's observations of the tensions that existed between the Islamic and Christian worlds, tensions rooted in the competition for hegemony over trade in the Far East. Seven hundred years later, these tensions are still acting themselves out.

This translation by Ronald Latham from 1958 includes an introduction that puts Marco Polo's life in context with events and includes footnotes to help the reader make sense of the myriad manuscripts that make up the travels of Marco Polo. This is a somewhat dry read; even Latham comments on the paucity of skill employed by Polo's chronicler. Once I put my mind in context with the narrative, however, I was able to roll with the repetition and sycophancy and enjoy the text.