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Featured Book

Marco Polo & the Discovery of the World
By John Larner
Yale University Press, 288 pages, 1999
Amazon.com Price: $20.97

By CAI MALI

Every schoolchild knows that Marco Polo had something to do with firing up the early Western imagination of China with his tales of travel through the Far East. But Sinophiles have gone searching, sometimes in vain, for traces in Marco's accounts of Khublai Khan's vast empire of the China and Chinese they might recognize.

Scholars have been especially preoccupied recently with questions and doubts - about the extent to which the accounts have been fictionalized, some going so far as to suggest that Marco never made it as far as China in the thirteenth century, and that the Book of Marco Polo is completely fraudulent. He did not seem to have learned Chinese in his 24 years of travels in the area, nor from his appointment as a civil servant in the service of the Great Khan's empire. And he does not appear in any Chinese accounts of the era. Yet his accounts exhibit a deep familiarity with the organization, government, local products, provincial borders and general geography of a world that very few people at the time could know about.

What are we to make of these perplexing contradictions?

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