In his description of China, Marco Polo recounts the names of cities and categorizes them with sets of attributes.

Marco Polo describes the abundance he passes through in these terms. Being a foreigner, he knew little about the local culture. He had access to stories of recent Mongol conquest, tales he may have heard from other officials, but he demonstrates no awareness of the two thousand years of Chinese history. The world he describes is a place where people recognize the authority of the central state and do business as part of the centralized economy. This economy was defined by the acceptance of paper money, an innovation introduced by Kublai which Marco describes in some details. To further describe the economy, he enumerates the useful products these people produce: silk, rice, cloth, paper, vegetables and fruit.

Instead he describes a world in which the possibilities for profitable trade are to be found everywhere. In his description of the world, trade is carried on by everyone he sees.

We now understand from Persian, Mongolian and Chinese sources that the steppe people who conquered eastern Asia practiced and accepted a diverse collection of religious beliefs. Shamanism, Daoism, Confucianism, Nestorian Christianity, Chan (Zen) Buddhism, Tantric (Tibetan) Buddhism, Sunni and Shia Islam were all present in this normal world and accepted by Kublai’s court as valid religions. The audience of The Book knew only two religions, Roman and Eastern Christianity, and one enemy, Islam. Marco Polo observes the other religious beliefs and practices as his description moves through various parts of Central Asia, China and India. The differences among many of these religions escape his notice. He does not recognize the Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist or Hindu statues and iconography he sees in the temples of China and Southeast Asia as different religions. When he describes China he observes the common feature a European could understand: the people of this city worship idols and cremate their dead. In India, outside of this normal world, his attention to details grows significantly. His description of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) includes perhaps the earliest European version of the life of Buddha. It is no worse than Herman Hesse’s popular novel Siddhartha, and much briefer. He also includes an admiring account of the ascetic practices of Hindu sadhus.

Larner points out that, despite the legend that a copy was available in Venice as a reference book for merchants, The Book is not a practical guide for European traders. One of those great missing details in The Book is any description of Marco Polo’s daily tasks during his decades away from Venice. The practical details of trading are missing, such as what to buy in this city and where to sell it or exchange it for other goods. Instead he describes a world in which the possibilities for profitable trade are to be found everywhere. In his description of the world, trade is carried on by everyone he sees. Rice, spices and silk are moving along the rivers and canals of Cathay. Woven fabrics are moving from India to Persia to Armenia. He reports on the places where precious minerals are plentiful. He tells us where gold is traded for silver at favorable rates, and where silver is exchanged for cowry shells.

While he does not focus on the details of trading, he does focus on quantities. Whether he was working as a tax official, a messenger or a trader, he explains the world in terms of numbers. Larner proposes that this is the result of a Venetian, rather than an ecclesiastical or classical, education. Marco’s most vivid descriptions are reserved for the three places he is sure will impress his European readers: Kublai’s summer residence of Shangdu, the new capital of Dadu (Beijing) and the newly conquered Song capital of Kinsai (Hangzhou). Whether he spent most of his time in these places is impossible to say. The purpose of these descriptions is not to report on his life. The purpose is to impress his audience with a vision of grandeur far greater than anything in Europe.

When the Mongol army took Hangzhou in 1276, it was the largest city on the planet. Population figures are not part of Marco Polo’s vocabulary. He describes the city’s size by invoking enormous numbers, saying the circumference of the city is 100 miles and that it contains 12,000 bridges. This same figure of 12,000 bridges shows up in the Odorico da Pordenone account, which suggests that the Chinese may have used it in the same way Americans describe Minnesota as “the land of a thousand lakes.” The figures that seem like incredible exaggerations may have simply been a way of saying “big”. At the same time, some of the numbers he gives are remarkably precise. Jacques Gernet estimates the population of Hangzhou in 1276 based on Chinese sources as well over one million.^[1] F.W. Mote points out that the Chinese method of counting households rather than individuals resulted in low estimates of actual population numbers. Without reference to the science of demography, Marco Polo produces an accurate population estimate of the world’s largest city by counting pounds of pepper consumed.