Marco Polo and Po-lo

                                                            Marco Polo and Po-lo


The study of cultural contact and exchange is intimately connected to the
question of agency. Culture, of course, can be transmitted by a number of
mechanisms – commodities, ideologies, literary works – as well as people.
Material culture, transported as trade, tribute, or booty, can diffuse artistic
motifs and technology over great distances. Texts, particularly religious texts,
also convey culture over time and space and most particularly between largescale,
urban-based civilizations. The extensive corpus of Chinese translations
of the Indian Buddhist canon well illustrates this phenomenon.1 In the
Mongolian era, the fourth mechanism, direct human agency, assumed, as
already argued, a very special importance in East–West cultural communication.
Given the Mongols’ penchant for moving imperial personnel, subject
peoples, and specialists from one cultural zone of the empire to another, there
were innumerable face-to-face encounters between individuals and communities
of the most diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. In this
part of the study, we will investigate the major “brokers” in medieval Eurasian
cultural history.
By far the most famous of these intermediaries is Marco Polo. As is well
known, from his own day to the present, his travels have been the center of
controversy; indeed, many deny that the Venetian ever set foot in China.2 His
defenders, naturally, have tried to confirm his accounts by detailed geographical–
historical commentaries and most particularly by seeking references to
his name in the Chinese sources of the Yuan era, which are studded with
foreign names, Turkic, Iranian, Muslim, and Tibetan, as well as Christian.
Efforts to find Marco Polo in the Asian sources were inaugurated in 1865
by the French scholar Pauthier who was the first to identify the Venetian with
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1 Walter Fuchs, “Zur technischen Organisation der Übersetzungen buddhischer Schriften ins
Chinesische,” Asia Major 6 (1930), 84–103.
2 My own view is that Marco Polo was in China and that his travels are a valuable source on medieval
Eurasia. For recent and persuasive defenses of this position, see Igor de Rachewiltz,
“Marco Polo Went to China,” Zentralasiatische Studien 27 (1997), 34–92; Jørgen Jensen, “The