The Silk Road Page #3

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With 1000 foot high dunes

and swirling sandstorms,

the Taklamakan is 600 miles of hell.

The Chinese call it

the desert of death.

The temperature of the desert is formidable.

In the summer, the temperature

can reach up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

There's no water, in the desert.

There's no wells.

So you're walking through

a sea of sand

and it's very difficult to think that

you might come out the other end.

It is here that Polo and his story

walk into a heated controversy.

Did Polo really make it

across the Taklamakan into China?

Or is the story of his arrival

in the East a complete fabrication?

Marco Polo has a format

when he travels.

He goes from city to city.

He tells you where he is

and he tells you how far it is

from one point to the next.

When he goes to visit the Mongol

capital he departs from that format.

He no longer tells you

the cities in between

where he is in north China

and what's at the Mongol capital.

So the effect when you're reading it

is very abrupt.

Did he go, how did he go,

what cities are in between?

And the only conclusion

I can draw is he didn't go,

that somebody told him about it

and he just adds it in.

This was a custom of travel writing

during that time.

You'd hear something and you'd claim

that you actually had been

and had actually witnessed the events

that somebody else told you about.

This has been taken by some scholars

to mean that he probably didn't travel

all the way to China.

That is taking things

a little too far.

Marco Polo wrote about his travels

while he was in prison.

That obviously is going to affect

the way he presents his information.

He's at a difficult time in his life

and he wants to attract an audience

so he's going to emphasize

the strangest and the most interesting

rather than the ordinary elements

of his travels.

From his squalid cell in Italy,

Marco wrote about the luxurious court

of Kublai Khan, the Mongol king,

which he supposedly reached in 1275.

He told how in Shengdu,

the city later immortalized as Xanadu,

the trials of his 4 year journey

suddenly seemed worthwhile.

"The Khan's palace is the largest

in the world.

The roof is ablaze with every color

it glitters like crystals and sparkles

from afar.

The hall is so vast that

it could seat 6000 for one banquet."

The descriptions that Marco Polo

provides for us,

descriptions of Xanadu for example,

the summer palace of Kublai Khan

dovetail with what we know of

the archeology of that city.

The city was excavated

in the 1930s by the Japanese

and they found that the placement of

the buildings

and the style of the buildings

was exactly the way Marco Polo

had described them.

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