The Customs of the Kingdoms of India by Marco Polo

The citizens could purchase paperback books with paper money, eat rice from fine porcelain bowls and wear silk garments, lived in prosperous city that no European town could match. A canal-based transportation system linked China's huge cities and markets in a vast internal communication network in which paper money and credit facilities were highly developed. He reported that Iron manufacture was around 125,000 tons a year (a level not reached in Europe before the 18th century) and salt production was on a prodigious scale: 30,000 tons a year in one province alone. China under the Yuan (The Mongol Empire) dynasty was a huge empire whose internal economy dwarfed that of Europe. He was amazed with China's enormous power, great wealth, and complex social structure. The covers and general appearance of the series are very appealing.Marco Polo described the Grand Canal but not the Great WallĪccording to the Silk Road Foundation: “Marco Polo traveled in great deal in China.

I wouldn't seek out the whole of Polo's work, but I'm glad to have had a taste of it and I'll be keeping it. Polo's writing style is somewhat repetitive, but rather hypnotic and reassuring in its own way and, at 85 pages, I can pretty much endure anything. One somewhat chilling and no doubt accurate item is to learn that there have been pirates in that part of the Indian Ocean between Africa and India for a thousand years (and more?). Magic was real and existed, in this case, there are weatherworkers in Zanzibar, so beware! Why not have a male and a female island where men and women live alone nine months of the year and only mingle (on female island) long enough for procreation and corn planting! (Boy children being handed over at the age of 14). Third, it isn't possible to disentangle what is accurate, what is cultural misunderstanding, and what is fabrication, and yet even so, the narrative fascinates, as it is all of a piece with the late medieval mind. Second, it is intrinsically fascinating, no matter how stilted the writing because these are Polo's own words and descriptions (and interpretations) of what he saw first-hand (although I suspect some bits were related to him by others). 'India' in this case, includes the eastern coast of Africa, down as far as Madacasgar. First of all, it is barely a book, being a selection from Polo's travel writings, one of a group of five or six I acquired somewhere or other, put out by Penguin in a 'Great Journeys' series. It's basically ridiculous to 'rate' a book of this sort.

The Customs of the Kingdoms of India by Marco Polo