TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO

Marco Polo (1254-1329) has achieved an archetypal status as a traveller and this is one of the first great travel books of Western literature, outside the ancient world. He recounts his journey to the Eastern court of Kublai Khan, the chieftan of the Mongol empire which covered the Asian continent. Encompassing a 24 year period from 1271, his account details travels in the service of the Great Khan from Beijing to Nothern India and ends with his return voyage from the Chinese port of Amoy to the Persian Gulf. Alternately factual and fantastic, Polo's prose at once reveals the medieval imagination's limits and captures the unfamiliar, exotic and unknown. 285 page Wordsworth reprint. Paperback.