Posted Monday, July 31, 2006; 20:00 HKT

The Travels of Marco Polo was conceived in a prison cell in Genoa, Italy, in 1298. A few years earlier Polo had returned to the West after an epic journey that lasted some 24 years. He then saw action in a naval battle between the Venetian and Genoese fleets, and was captured. It was in jail that he met and befriended Rustichello of Pisa, a well-known writer and collector of Arthurian romances. Their collaboration yielded a book that would give Europe its first authoritative account of the Middle and Far East, in particular China, and reveal the presence of a vast empire and advanced civilization far greater than anything Europeans could achieve or even imagine.

More than 100 copies of that long-lost original exist, many dating from the 14th and 15th centuries. There is no definitive manuscript, however, and all existing versions have been embellished, doctored or censored by the Christian establishment over the years. Modern editions are thus collations and translations of imperfect copies. This murky history helps explain why the book describes what the Venetian could not possibly have seen, and overlooks sights that any traveler to China must have witnessed—like the Great Wall, foot-binding and chopsticks. Skeptics say that Polo never ventured to China and that he and Rustichello used second-hand information from other travelers, especially Arab traders. Certainly, there is no hard historical evidence that Polo actually visited all the places he describes. But most of the detail has since been corroborated by historians and geographers, confounding critics and confirming the importance of the book as the fullest and most accurate account of Asia in its time.

Originally called Description of the World, Travels aims for geographical completeness, not the immediacy and excitement of personal encounter. It's not a travelogue. Consistent with the possibility that Polo was not an eyewitness, his book is not "on-the-spot" reporting, and only loosely follows an itinerary. To modern audiences, the book may seem dull and repetitive, to be dipped into, not read cover to cover. Yet Travels was a revolutionary piece of writing. It radically altered European understanding of Asia by forcing the West to recognize a superior culture in the East, and, by describing with such verve the luxuries and sensuousness of Chinese cities, it impressed the idea of an exotic East on the European psyche.

Polo's book contributed to what we now understand as Orientalism—the construction of the East by the West. But unlike later examples of Orientalism, Travels puts a very positive gloss on Asia. In medieval times Europe was plagued by inept and corrupt leaders, Christian fundamentalism, misguided Crusades, and the Black Death. While Polo's wealthy family flourished in Venice, for ordinary folk life was a harsh subsistence of unceasing toil, bland food, poor hygiene and basic clothing. To this grim reality, Polo introduced: Kublai Khan, a model statesman who presided wisely over an empire several times Europe's size; cities that made Venice look small and backward; fantastic palaces dripping with gold; advanced technology, transport and trading systems; spices, fruits, precious stones, silks and cloths of gold; vital citizens with time for hunting, boating on romantic lakes in gilded barges, bathing and fabulous banquets. Polo's book was an encyclopedic source of knowledge, but it also titillated and excited its audience with realistic accounts of an exotic and sensual East where everything could be found that Europe lacked and greedily desired.

The Venetian literally changed the Western view of the world. European maps in his time were based on Biblical interpretations and classical mythology. Jerusalem was at the center. At the margins the mapmakers drew monsters and savages, because there, far from the Christian center, Nature herself was believed to be monstrous. Then came Polo's book, describing great civilizations in the East, and a world not centered on Jerusalem, politically or geographically. This recasting of the world into a more dynamic and multi-centered geographical space was the first step toward what we now call globalization.

Travels appeared in popular anthologies circulating in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Christopher Columbus had an early copy, and made notes in the margins. He later bungled into America while searching out a western route to Polo's Cathay. Portuguese explorers such as Bartolomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama followed, in search of the rich pickings described by Polo. His splendid vision of the East inadvertently stirred Europe's colonial ambition, laying the roots of imperialism.

Yet there is no imperialist intent in Polo's book. Furthermore, it is a book of liberal and enlightened humanism. No one can fail to appreciate its celebration of the heterogeneity of nature, geography and, above all, people. His work expresses wonder and joy in what is unfamiliar. Races are differentiated but not denigrated, and the customs of different cultures are met with enthusiastic curiosity, not the conformism and prejudice prevalent in Europe at the time. Travels had a moral for medieval Europe: let diversity and tolerance replace division and xenophobia—a moral no less relevant today than in Marco Polo's time.

Paul Smethurst, associate professor of English at the University of Hong Kong, teaches courses on travel writing from Marco Polo to the present