BOOK OF THE DAY: Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe's Discovery of the East,By John Man, Bantam, 311pp, £20
ONE OF the great misfortunes in travel literature is that Marco Polo was such an appalling writer – bombastic, inaccurate, egomaniacal, prone to fabrication, and with a tendency to focus on the least interesting aspect to the detriment of everything else.
The debate still rages as to whether he travelled from Venice across Asia to China or if the whole thing is fantasy. John Man's Xanaduargues that Polo did indeed make the journey. He offers reasonable explanations for Polo's failure to mention the Great Wall or the practices of tea drinking and foot-binding, not to mention why he would have claimed the journey to China took 3½ years when it couldn't have taken more than a year.
Some of Man’s explanations are convincing, although even he admits that “Polo’s account veers wildly between hard fact, hearsay and legend”. The maddening thing is we can never tell which is which. Polo’s work could have contributed so much to our understanding of Asia in the 13th century if someone had bothered to offer him a crash course in the who, what, where and when of good reportage.
Man describes Polo's account as "many books in one: part geographical description, part guidebook, part merchants' handbook, without enough details to serve as any of them, but with plenty of incidental detail on social behaviour and history and legends". This aptly describes Man's own book also. Xanaduis a hodgepodge of travel writing, vague supposition, archaeological review and historical reappraisal.
It is scattered with questionably relevant detours and reads like a mixum-gatherum of his previous books.
Man’s focus is more on Kublai Khan and his grandfather, Genghis, than on Polo. He admits that there are better accounts of Polo’s life than his, and of course there are also better and more comprehensive works on Genghis and Kublai Khan – including Man’s own earlier books.
The book teases you with many intriguing subjects which are not adequately explored. The sophistication of the Khan dynasty will be a revelation to readers who presume Europe had a monopoly on culture in the 13th century. As Man explains: “Kublai Khan, who commanded all China and exerted influence over much of Eurasia, was the wealthiest and most powerful man in the 13th- century world – perhaps the most powerful ever until the emergence of modern superpowers.”
Kublai and Genghis were far more than the war-mongers we often caricaturise them as, they established enlightened, tolerant empires over vast areas that guaranteed religious and cultural freedom.
Man's book comes most alive in the two chapters dealing with the eponymous city, Xanadu, built by Kublai as the first capital combining Mongol and Chinese traditions. I found myself hanging on every detail of Kublai's court – his hawking expeditions with 10,000 falconers, military escapades, pony-express network that stretched to Russia and Iran, and engineering projects that matched the scale and ingenuity of the Three Gorges Dam.
Perhaps the best thing about this book is that it sparks you to learn more about the Khans and Mongolian history. Polo provided a palatable insight into 13th- century Chinese-Mongolian history – a sort of Disneyfied sociological commentary – and Man's Xanaduought to be celebrated for doing a similar job.
Manchán Magan is a travel writer and documentary maker. He writes the Magan's World column for The Irish TimesGo supplement