Soon after returning to Venice, Marco Polo was captured during a sea battle with the Republic of Genoa. In jail at the age of 44, he began to recount his tales to a cellmate. Polo detailed his epic journey across Asia and his stories and adventures from his time as a personal aid to Kublai Khan, the Emperor of China. The resulting book became an inspiration to many other subsequent explorers. There is much to learn from the observations, behaviour and perceptions from the travels of Marco Polo.
The first part of Polo’s book chronicles his three and a half year journey just to get to the court of Kublai Khan. The trek conducted mainly on horseback was very long and very gruelling with lots of obstacles. The men travelled over mountains and through deserts, having to deal with wild animals, extreme weather and illness, all while trying to avoid the many outlaws along the way.
The three travellers: Polo, his father and his uncle were merchants and conducted their business on the Silk Road as they went. The ancient trade routes known as the Silk Road connected east and west civilisation. While avoiding outlaws, negotiation was required not only for trade but for hiring local soldiers to escort them over their territory. Jewellery was the primary goods that they traded in as they were low in bulk but high in value.
Polo describes in great detail the differences in trading methods, customs and traditions, food preparation and religious practices along the route. As one of the first Europeans to traverse the Silk Road, he travelled further than many of his predecessors, reaching as far as Mongolia and Cathay, now called China.
So what lessons can you take from Marco Polo’s arduous trip? It highlights the importance of having long term goals and the importance of perseverance in achieving those goals. In your life you may end up taking on something you haven’t done before. It may even be possible that nobody has done it before or something that many people may deem impossible.
You need to endure the long journeys to achieve your own long term goals. What seems impossible now may not seem impossible in twenty years’ time. It may even be commonplace.
Marco Polo paved the way for many other Westerners to set out along the routes of the Silk Road in future years and began an age of exploration to exotic and faraway places. The pioneer explorer Christopher Columbus was heavily influenced by Marco Polo’s travels. His copy of the book was found to have plenty of handwritten annotations and notes.
Elon Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of revolutionising space travel. He also has a longer term goal of establishing Mars as a self-sustaining civilisation. When he first told people about his aim, they thought he was smoking something. He named his space craft “Dragon” as a shortened version of the phrase “puff the magic dragon” because of this.
Through perseverance and a laser beam focus, SpaceX, with Musk at the helm, have achieved the first goal, significantly reducing space transport costs by successfully landing and reusing its rockets.
The human spirit of exploration has meant that you’ve never been able to hold people back. Will you be one of the explorers?
The second part of the travels of Marco Polo describes life in the court of Kublai Khan. The Polo’s first entered the court of Khan about four years after their journey began. He was the ruler of the largest empire in the world at the time and the grandson of Genghis Khan. However, Marco Polo described him as not only a conqueror, but also educated, tolerant and civilised. The Chinese civilisation was advanced and innovative under his leadership.
For 17 years, Marco Polo served as an ambassador for Kublai Khan, travelling far and wide in his empire and reporting back on commercially valuable information which would make Khan richer. His job as ambassador took him to distant lands including Japan and India. As a result, he became fluent in four different languages and became a valuable asset for the emperor.
Polo was not only tolerant of various different cultures and customs he came across; he also actively immersed himself in the society that he was in. In doing so he discovered many inventions such as paper being created specifically for paper money, compasses for navigation and coal being used for heat instead of wood.
Marco Polo’s book prompted change from the people who read it. Europeans learnt about the new customs and inventions, which created a yearning for more. The book was written before the printing press, so individual copies had to be made by hand. Over time, paper led to the printing press and the spreading of information. Compasses were used for mapmaking and exploration to help find new lands and faster routes by indicating the right direction.
The Travels of Marco Polo teaches us that observing other cultures and customs with an open mind, helps to provide us with a different perspective. This in turn could lead to discovering new methods and new inventions providing increased efficiency or productivity and ultimately improving ways of working and ways of living.
Prior to the documenting of Polo’s travels, the people of Europe thought they were the most enlightened civilisation on the planet. Marco Polo showed them there is an alternative civilised culture in the East which motivated them to want to change and adopt some of their customs. The broadening of the European mind led to them abandoning their narrow-minded concepts of the world and to think more about how the East and the West could work together.
Bruce Lee fused ideas from both the East and the West with his martial arts films and his overall philosophy. He too travelled at a young age between San Francisco and Hong Kong and embraced the attitude of open mindedness that Marco Polo had. “Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against” he once said, advocating staying open to the viewpoint of others and new possibilities. He also learnt from many different places, taking in what he found valuable to improve his own martial art, Jeet Kune Do: “Absorb what is useful, Discard what is not, Add what is uniquely your own.”
Some of Marco Polo’s most extraordinary claims are easy for us to understand today. He documented and interpreted things he came across that are now familiar to us but at the time were completely new to him. Paper money for example was unheard of in Venice but it had been used in the Far East for over a thousand years. His travels are still a valuable reminder of the importance of perspective, broad-mindedness and adaptability.