The Travels

Marco Polo’s voyages began in 1271 with a visit to China. Afterward, he served Kublai Khan on numerous diplomatic missions in the Far East. His subsequent account of his travels offers a fascinating glimpse of what he encountered abroad: unfamiliar religions; new customs and societies; the spices and silks of the East; the precious gems, exotic vegetation, and wild beasts of faraway lands. Evoking a remote and long-vanished world with color and immediacy, Marco Polo’s book revolutionized Western ideas about the then-unknown East and remains one of the greatest travel accounts of all time. Nigel Cliff’s new translation, based on the original medieval sources, is a fresh, authoritative rendering, with a lively introduction and notes.