Marco Polo: Description of Hangzhou

Impact

Some historians believe that Marco Polo influenced Christopher Columbus in his desire to sail west over the Atlantic to China, since Columbus is known to have owned a copy of Polo’s book. Columbus may have also received a second copy after returning from his first voyage to the Americas. It is contested whether Polo’s book had an impact on pre-Columbian mapmakers; his name did appear in the Catalan Atlas composed in 1375 and given to Charles V of France. Although Marco Polo was writing of the Chinese as “the other,” this is not the negative “other” that developed later in European history, out of a belief in the superiority of Western civilization. Polo’s is a magnificent and glorious “other” that by all accounts fired the imaginations of its readers. The name of Marco Polo continues to reverberate in the twenty-first century. A “Marco Polo traveler” today is a reference to one traveling first class, on the best flights and in the best hotels and cruise staterooms.