Tracing the century-long academic debate over Marco Polo’s visit to China
Academics have been split on the historical accuracy of Marco Polo’s visit to China for many years. The debate commands far-reaching academic and social significance. Photo: FILE
Over the last 100 years, a group of outstanding scholars across the world have discussed the historical accuracy of Marco Polo’s visit to China and The Travels of Marco Polo, including such big names as Henry Yule, Paul Pelliot, Yang Zhijiu and Francis Cleaves. The split between affirmation and negation has continued until these years. This issue commands major and far-reaching academic and social significance.
As early as the 1890s, renowned British scholar Henry Yule pointed out in the Preface to the Travels of Marco Polo that there was an assortment of omissions in the book, such as the Great Wall, tea, foot-binding, cormorant fishing, artificial breeding, printed books and Chinese characters. Many places in the book were recorded in the Tatar or Persian languages. Also, there were mistakes concerning Genghis Khan’s death and his descendants. Yule’s criticism was serious and pertinent, but it didn’t shake his trust in the work and his exceptional translation.
After that, however, global academics started their first debate over Marco Polo’s travels in China.
In the 1920s and 1930s, many scholars like Zhang Xinglang and Shu Shicheng held that “Marco Polo was Bolod, an imperial ambassador of the Yuan court.” The statement was refuted shortly, but it disturbed scholars back then because no traces about Marco Polo and his stories had been found in the immense number of Chinese historical records.
In the summer of 1941, Yang Zhijiu, a graduate student at Southwest Associated University, accidentally discovered a relevant record in The Yongle Encyclopedia and then published A Written Record on Marco Polo’s Departure from China. After textual research, he found it true that Marco Polo, accompanied by a Mongolian princess, left the city of Quanzhou and returned to Venice via Persia. Marco Polo did go to China. Yang found that Polo left China in early 1291, instead of the early 1292 that many Westerners had proposed. This find was the sole evidence in Chinese works of Marco Polo’s whereabouts in China, supplying solid proof for The Travels of Marco Polo. His research was well recognized by such experts as Xiang Da, Gu Jiegang, Tang Yongtong and Fu Sinian.
The paper, however, failed to reach many Western scholars due to the isolation caused by the Second World War. Fortunately, French Orientalist Paul Pelliot, despite being plagued by illness in his later years, looked up Notes of Travels of Marco Polo while using Western documents like History of the Mongols, from Genghis Khan to Timur, or Tamerlane by Abraham Constantine Mouradgea d’Ohsson. He proposed that Marco Polo’s departure from China took place in 1291, which coincided with Yang’s research. Yang was incrementally recognized as the first scholar to authenticate Marco Polo’s visit to China.
In 1966, German scholar Frank Herbert expressed doubts over Marco Polo’s failure to mention Chinese tea or calligraphy in the description of his time serving in the Yangzhou court. Thus it remained unclear whether the Polo family went to China, and the second debate got under way around the 1980s.
At the beginning of 1982, in his Several Issues on Marco Polo’s Travels in China, Yang made pertinent and persuasive arguments on a number of topics, such as Marco Polo’s identity in China and his ability to speak and write Chinese.
In 1979, American scholar John Haeger identified some contradictions and suspicious points after looking through The Travels of Marco Polo. In his opinion, Marco Polo only visited the capital of the Yuan Dynasty, and the accounts of other parts of China were all hearsay. At the end of 1982, Yang located eloquent evidence of Marco Polo’s whereabouts in southern China from his descriptions about Yunnan, Persia, India, Zhenjiang, Fuzhou and Suzhou. Marco Polo not only went to north China, but also the south.
In 1992, Cai Meibiao published On Marco Polo’s Travels in China, arguing that Marco Polo spent 17 years in China as a merchant, rather than a traveler or a missionary. This might be the reason why the book focused on what Polo saw and heard while rarely mentioning his personal stories. This could also explain the lack of records about him in ancient Chinese documents and his engagement in Yangzhou’s business management. The paper made major breakthroughs in Polo’s identity in China, because it responded, in a reasonable way, to scholars’ doubts.
In the late 1990s, a third and more intense and exciting discussion arose between scholars who supported the authenticity of Marco Polo’s visit to China and Frances Wood, a representative of the skeptics.
Frances Wood, also known as Wu Fangsi, is an English librarian and Sinologue. In her 1995 book Did Marco Polo Go To China? Wood basically follows her predecessors’ footsteps by casting doubts over factual errors in the text, documentation omissions and the absence of Chinese records. The work clarified and systemized earlier arguments and consolidated suspicions into a firm negation. It was translated into multiple languages, such as French, Japanese, German and Chinese, and distributed around the world, capturing worldwide attention.
Yang published an article in response to Wood’s attack. In 1999, his book Marco Polo in China started another round of debate with Wood. Yang listed the mistakes and shortcomings of skeptical scholars and pointed out Wood’s failure to thoroughly understand Zhan Chi’s accounts of Marco Polo. He highlighted the problem caused by the many versions of The Travels of Marco Polo, arguing that it is far-fetched to deny the authenticity of Polo’s arrival in China merely based on varying descriptions in different versions. Also, he answered with solid proof to Wood’s questions concerning documentation omissions of porcelain, printing, Chinese characters, tea, foot-binding and the Great Wall.
Finally, Yang clarified misunderstanding about Polo’s travel routes and material sources and emphasized details such as the degrees of flogging penalties in the Yuan Dynasty and Mar Sergius’ whereabouts in Zhenjiang, two historical facts that had not appeared in any other important Western materials at that time. “If they were copied from a Persian guide, how is there such a detailed account?” Yang wrote in his book. Adopting this counter-evidence method, he responded to Wood with the clear answer, “Marco Polo was in China.”
In 1998, Huang Shijian and Gong Yingyan published Marco Polo and the Great Wall: A Comment on Did Marco Polo Go To China? to refute Wood’s criticism concerning the omission of the Great Wall. They stated that most parts of the Great Wall built in the Qin and Han dynasties had turned into ruins in the Yuan Dynasty. It only appeared in Yuan poems, articles, songs and geographical records. The Great Wall, as it is seen as a symbol of China, was constructed in the Ming Dynasty, about 100 years later than Polo’s visit to the country. It is reasonable and natural that Marco Polo didn’t mention the Great Wall in the book.
In the summer of 2000, Yang initiated and presided over the International Symposium on Marco Polo and the 13th Century at Nankai University in Tianjin. Wood was invited to have a face-to-face dialogue with him and give a keynote speech. Wood admitted that she didn’t deny Marco Polo’s arrival in China. Instead, she intended to call for greater academic attention to the complexities of the manuscripts about Marco Polo. Many scholars in this debate attended the event and exchanged ideas.
After the century-long discussion, the global academic circle became more certain about Marco Polo’s visit to China.
In terms of future studies on Marco Polo, Rong Xinjiang, a professor at Peking University, and his team are translating Notes to Travels of Paul Pelliot. The work is highly anticipated. In addition, major recent achievements include Hans Ulrich Vogel’s Marco Polo Was in China: New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues (2012) and Ma Xiaolin’s Marco Polo and Yuan China: In Light of Texts and Etiquette (2018).
These scholars have used a wide range of multilingual historical records to conduct exchanges among such countries as the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan. They have torn down the wall between Chinese studies on Marco Polo and bibliographic studies on Marco Polo, which is a good representation of the distinct features of scholarship in the new era.
This article was translated from Guangming Daily.
edited by MA YUHONG