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Informationen zum Autor Marco Polo was born in Venice in 1254 and died circa 1324. Colin Thubron is an award-winning author of novels and travel books, including Behind the Wall: A Journey through China and Shadow of the Silk Road. Peter Harris graduated from Oxford in classical Chinese and has a Ph.D. in Asian history from Monash. He lived and worked for many years in different parts of Asia including China, where he was representative of the Ford Foundation and a visiting professor at Nanjing University. He is now a Senior Fellow in the China Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Klappentext Now in a handsome and newly revised hardcover edition: the extraordinary travelogue that has enthralled readers for more than seven centuries. Marco Polo's vivid descriptions of the splendid cities and people he encountered on his journey along the Silk Road through the Middle East, South Asia, and China opened a window for his Western readers onto the fascinations of the East and continued to grow in popularity over the succeeding centuries. To a contemporary audience, his colorful stories-and above all, his breathtaking description of the court of the great Kublai Khan, Mongol emperor of China-offer dazzling portraits of worlds long gone. The classic Marsden and Wright translation of The Travels has been revised and updated by Peter Harris, with new notes, a bibliography, and an introduction by award-winning travel writer Colin Thubron. I N T R O D U C T I O N -- Of all the travel sagas ever written, none is more richly astonishing than Marco Polo's Description of the World. It records a land of such fabulous difference that to enter it was like passing through a mirror; and it is this passage - from a still-provincial Europe to an empire of brilliant strangeness - which gives the tale even now a dream-like quality. Even in its day - and for generations afterwards - Polo's book was often regarded merely as the fairy-tale conceit of a vainglorious merchant. Only with time has its portrait of China at the height of the Mongol dynasty - a portrait rich in details which once seemed too outlandish to be believed - been largely corroborated. Marco Polo was born in 1254 into a family of Venetian merchants, wealthy if not patrician. Even before his celebrated journey his father and uncle had travelled from Constantinople to the Crimea, then continued some 5,000 miles east to the court of Khubilai Khan - the Mongol emperor of a newly conquered China - probably at Cambalu´ , modern Beijing. Marco Polo describes their prodigious journey only briefly, as a prelude to his own. He records how the two men started back for Europe with a request from Khubilai that the pope send them back to him. They were to bring with them a hundred Christian savants and some oil from the lamp above Christ's sepulchre in Jerusalem. By the time Polo's father arrived in Venice in 1269, after sixteen years away, his wife was dead and he had a fifteen-year-old son, whom he had never seen. This was Marco. Two years later the seventeen-year-old youth, with the two elder Polos, set out on the long journey back to Cambalu´ . Their route is not always easy to follow. Marco's account, dictated almost thirty years later, is full of gaps and muddled chronology. But it seems that after visiting Acre on the coast of Palestine the Polos moved in a wide loop from eastern Turkey down through modern Iran to Hormuz on the Persian Gulf. From there they crossed Persia north-east to Balkh, in today's Afghanistan, and over the Pamir mountains through Kashgar to the Taklamakan desert of north-west China. Skirting this dangerous wasteland southward, they then circled north of the Yellow River to the khan's summer palace of Xandu´ , and at last to Cambalu´ . The journey had taken three and a half years. There follows the heart of Polo'...
