The Silk Road Page #5

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Polo's account

lies in his prison cell in Italy.

Marco did not write the book himself.

He dictated it,

during his year in jail,

to his cellmate, Rustichello

who happened to be a writer

with a passion for fairytales.

Rustichello was a man

whose renowned for writing romances

and not actual descriptions of events.

And so obviously the fact that

Rustichello rather than Marco Polo

set down the work may have added some

of these legendary

and mythical qualities to the work

that Marco Polo had not intended.

The only verifiable piece of evidence

from Polo's life

his will reveals that

he died a wealthy man.

Yet his nickname"Il Milione"

the big one

mockingly referred to the size of

his imagination, not his bank balance.

Marco was defiant till the end.

When asked by his friends

on his deathbed in 1324

whether he had really been

to China, Marco replied:

"I have only told you half of

what I saw."

Marco Polo died

surrounded by doubters,

yet his influence on the history

of exploration is undisputed.

His controversial book became the

bible for a new generation of explorers.

The inspiration for

Christopher Columbus'

historic discovery

of the new world.

The greatest impact Marco Polo has

on later explorers is planting the idea

that you can go to exotic places

and write about them and become famous.

When you think about it nobody

before him is famous as an explorer.

So he becomes the first famous

explorer, adventurer.

Whether Marco Polo did make it China

or not, one thing is certain.

His dream of pioneering

a trade connection

between East and West

was never realized.

China again dissolved into civil war,

making travel in the East impossible.

The tantalizing promise of

the Silk Road

once again faded into the past

craving fulfillment in another age.

set out in Marco Polo's footsteps.

Unlike Polo, Sven Hedin was not

in search of wealth.

He was after something

far more elusive and dangerous.

Stockholm, Sweden. 1949.

Sven Hedin, the 84 year old explorer,

prepares a memoir of his life.

In his prime he heroically explored

the earth's final frontier.

He discovered lost cities

of the Silk Road,

bringing to life

a forgotten civilization.

Hedin, the ambitious adventurer,

had won the adulation of the world.

He was the Neil Armstrong of his day.

You know, Inner Asia was the moon.

And he went.

He was very famous,

a rock star at the time.

But his passion for the spotlight

led to a very dangerous liaison.

After the war, Sven Hedin was

obliterated from the memory of Europe.

He was a persona non grata.

Nobody wanted to touch him

after the second world war.

Sven Hedin was really a person

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