Marco Polo

Also known as Ma Ke · Bo Luo

Marco Polo was born in 1254 into a merchant family of Venice. In 1271 he set out east with his father Niccolo and his uncle Maffeo, crossing Central Asia to reach Khubilai Khan's summer capital Shangdu in 1275. By his own account he spent about seventeen years in Yuan service, travelling on missions to Yunnan and elsewhere and holding a post at Yangzhou. In 1291 the Polos sailed from Quanzhou with the embassy escorting the princess Kokochin to marry the Ilkhan, and they reached Venice in 1295. Captured in a sea battle between Venice and Genoa in 1298, he told his story in prison to his fellow captive Rustichello of Pisa, who wrote it up as the Description of the World, known in Chinese as the Travels of Marco Polo. He died in Venice in 1324. No Yuan Chinese source names him, but in 1941 Yang Zhijiu found a 1290 document quoted in the Yongle Encyclopedia that names three envoys escorting the princess, matching his book.