Marco Polo: From Venice to the Great Khan and Back

Marco was fifteen when his father Niccolò came home to Venice and found that his wife had died. The two brothers waited a couple of years for a new Pope to be chosen, then set out for Acre with the boy. By the time the adventure began, in 1271, Marco was seventeen. The book never says where they boarded ship, so the pin marks St Mark's Square, the heart of the city they left.

Location precision: The book names Venice but not a quay; the pin marks Piazza San Marco.

Visitor guidance: St Mark's Square is a public square; the site of the Polo house, the last Venice stop, is a short walk north.

The Polos had got as far as Layas when word came that the legate they had consulted at Acre had been elected Pope, as Gregory of Piacenza, and they were called back. He gave them letters for the Great Kaan and appointed two Dominican friars to go with them. The friars lost their nerve when war broke out in Armenia and turned back. Beneath Acre's citadel, halls of the Knights Hospitaller, buried under rubble since 1291, have been dug out.

Location precision: The book names the city, not a building; the pin marks the Old City of Acre.

Visitor guidance: The Old City is a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the Hospitaller halls lie beneath the citadel.

On the shore of the Gulf Polo found Hormos, a harbour city where merchants from India unloaded spices, pearls, silks and elephants' teeth. He thought it a very sickly place with a tremendous sun, and he distrusted the local ships, stitched together with husk twine and no iron fastenings. Yule suspects the Polos came here meaning to sail on, but abandoned the plan and turned north. Medieval Hormuz stood on the mainland near today's Minab, before the port moved to its island.

Location precision: The port Polo describes stood on the mainland coast; the pin marks the nearby town of Minab.

By Yule's reconstruction, the travellers crossed the Pamir highlands and came down upon Kashgar, which Polo spells Cascar. He found a trading country of gardens, vineyards and cotton, whose merchants travelled the world, and many Nestorian Christians with churches of their own. Polo visited about 1273–74. Kashgar is still a market city: its Sunday Market is the largest in Central Asia.

Location precision: Polo describes the city and its kingdom without naming a site; the pin marks central Kashgar.

Thirty days across the desert brought the Polos to Sachiu, a city of Tangut already under the Great Kaan. Polo saw abbeys and minsters full of idols of every fashion, and a funeral custom that stuck in his memory: the dead were burned together with paper figures of men, horses and camels. Sachiu corresponds to today's Dunhuang, once called Sachu, a Silk Road stop best known for the nearby Mogao Caves, 735 of them, noted for Buddhist art.

Location precision: Polo names the city but not a site; the pin marks the centre of Dunhuang, the city identified with Sachiu.

Visitor guidance: The Mogao Caves, with their Buddhist art, are near the city.

The Polos found the Great Kaan at Kemenfu, which Yule identifies as Kaiping, later Shangtu, and presented young Marco as his father's son and the Kaan's man. "Welcome is he too," said the Emperor. Polo's Chandu had a marble palace with gilded rooms painted with men, beasts and birds, a park walled for 16 miles, and a second palace of gilded cane that could be taken down and put up again. Kublai stayed there June to August; Coleridge's Xanadu poem came from this place. Ming forces sacked the city in 1369; the ruins are a UNESCO site.

Visitor guidance: The ruins lie in Zhenglan Banner, Inner Mongolia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2012.

Marco lived in the emperor's lands for 17 years. He learned several languages and four scripts, and took note that the Kaan wanted more than reports of business from his ambassadors: "I had far liever hearken about the strange things," he would say. Polo's Cambaluc was a new city built beside the old, four-square, 24 miles round, with streets so straight you could see gate to gate. Nothing of the palace survives, but Beihai Park keeps the lake Kublai's builders walled into the Imperial City, and stretches of the Yuan wall stand as the Tucheng.

Location precision: The Ming razed Kublai's palaces; the pin marks Beihai Park, whose lake was enclosed within the Imperial City.

Visitor guidance: Beihai Park is a public park in central Beijing.

Ten miles out of Cambaluc, Polo crossed the Pulisanghin river by a stone bridge so fine that it had few equals: 300 paces long, wide enough for ten riders abreast, with 24 arches and marble lions on marble columns. The bridge you can visit was rebuilt in 1698 under the Kangxi Emperor, on the site of one begun in 1189, and has 11 arches, but the stone lions remain, hundreds of them. In Europe it became known simply as the Marco Polo Bridge.

Visitor guidance: The bridge lies about 15 km southwest of central Beijing, in Fengtai District.

Polo called Kinsay (Hangzhou) "the finest and the noblest in the world", drawing on the written statement the conquered Queen had sent to Bayan, meant to move Kublai to spare it. He wrote of twelve thousand stone bridges, so high that fleets could pass beneath, and a lake ringed with palaces where citizens held marriage feasts on two islands. Hangzhou fell to Kublai's armies in 1276; modern scholars think Polo exaggerates its size. West Lake has drawn visitors since the Tang dynasty.

Visitor guidance: West Lake has been a tourist attraction since the Tang dynasty.

Kublai let the Polos go only to escort a bride, the 17-year-old Mongol princess Kököchin, to Persia. They appear to have sailed from Zayton, today's Quanzhou, in 1291 or early 1292 (sources differ). Polo called its haven one of the two greatest in the world for commerce: for every shipload of pepper bound for Christendom, a hundred came to Zayton, and the Kaan took a tenth of all imports. Of some 600 aboard the fleet, only eight survived. The maritime museum shows the Quanzhou ship, unearthed in 1974.

Location precision: The sources name the port, not a quay; the pin marks the Quanzhou Maritime Museum.

Visitor guidance: Quanzhou's medieval port is on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Polo returned to Venice in 1295, after 24 years, with great riches. A tale from the later editor Ramusio says that nobody knew them, that they looked and sounded like Tartars, and that rubies, sapphires, diamonds and emeralds spilled out when they unpicked their shabby coats. Yule doubts Ramusio's details. The family palazzo, in the parish of San Giovanni Crisostomo, became the Corte del Milion, and Venetian tradition places it where the Teatro Malibran now stands.

Location precision: Venetian tradition, not a document, places the house here; the pin marks Teatro Malibran, built on the traditional site.

Visitor guidance: Teatro Malibran is an opera house.

Polo was probably caught by the Genoese in a skirmish in 1296, though tradition says it was the Battle of Curzola two years later; Yule noted that no contemporary source for Curzola has been found. In captivity he dictated his memoirs, over almost a year, to a fellow prisoner, Rustichello da Pisa, who had earlier written an Arthurian romance. Tradition places the prison in Palazzo San Giorgio. Polo was released in August 1299; about 150 early copies of the book survive.

Location precision: Palazzo San Giorgio is the traditional site of his imprisonment; the sources do not fix the date or place of his capture.