Silk Riders: On the Trail of Marco Polo

Silk Riders: Jo and Gareth Morgan's Incredible Journey on the Trail of Marco Polo was an interesting read. Jo and Gareth were avid motorbikers, and as they were finishing a ride high in the Indian Himalaya they started thinking of their future tours. A fellow rider tossed out the silk road and Jo and Gareth really liked the idea. The trip took two years to organize. In that time they had to figure out political details, travel logistics, cultural awareness issues, get and curry sponsorship, and of course figure out who among their friends could join them on their trip. BMW only provided at large discount 7 bikes and so the trip was limited to 7. 

The 7 were kiwis, but their trip would begin at the BMW factory in Munich where the new bikes recently broken in in the Australian outback and imported into Germany to begin the trip would get a total tuning in readiness for the multi-thousand-kilometer journey.

Then in 2005 the trip began. They were waved off in Munich by a single person, an English motorcyclist who journeyed from Yorkshire to Bavaria to see them off, and off they went through the lower reaches of Germany, into Austria, to the foothills of the Alps, and onward to Venice, the family home of Marco Polo. Despite the Polo family being one of the most prominent families of Venice and despite the since fame of the explorer, the 7 were surprised at the few memorials commemorating one of the city's most famous past residents. There is a library where Marco's last will and testament is held and the San Lorenzo church, in the yard of which he was buried in 1324. Near the site of his homestead is an area of little courts called 'Il Milione', which was Marco's nickname, 'the teller of a million tales'. 

Then off to the Balkans they sped. Few people are aware that Marco Polo was not a Venetian by birth but rather a Croatian. Marco was born on Korcula, an island of what is now Croatia. Of course the 7 had to go to the island, ferrying one of the bikes over for a picture with the iconic bike in front of what is said to be the house of Marco Polo's birth. 

To Serbia, Bulgaria, then Gallipolli, Turkey, which was very significant to the Kiwis as they recalled the Kiwis who died trying to claim the cliffs of Gallipolli. Onward to Istanbul where Jo started to having trouble as women were not to be seen in public, certainly not on a motorbike, and even though as she progressed further into Iran, the chador she wore just wasn't quite enough because it outlined her provocative bottom as she sped along. 

A disappointment to me in the book was the little attention given to following the trail of Marco Polo, as far as information on what they discovered in relation to Marco. Instead, the intent of the book was just to skim over the countries the 7 sped through and give mostly motorcycle commentation on the road conditions or visa issues. There were tidbits on culture but obviously the book was about a mad dash across Asia following a trail and not really picking up that many culturally rich experiences. 

That said, the highlight of the Iranian segment of the trip was the visit to the Valley of the Assassins, of which Marco wrote. The fortress of Alamut still remains, and as legend goes, an 11th century Hashish-iyun sect, basically an Islamic mercenary group led by a fanatical imam, had an unusual method for training young men to fight unconditionally. He would dose them with hashish and then turn them loose in a five-star pleasure garden stocked with milk and honey and virgins--all accouterments of paradise. After a couple of weeks, he removed them and cut off their narcotic supply. Finding themselves in a military camp they were told that they had been to paradise and if they hoped to live again in the style they had experienced in paradise, they would need to distinguish themselves in battle, and the imam of course provided that. These feared, driven warriors were known as Hashish-iyun, and the word 'assassin' derives from this group.

The Silk Riders only did the overland route from Venice to Xanadu (now Yuanshangdu) and down to Beijing. They didn't even attempt to follow Marco's route of 20+ years. 

To Tehran (the city that couldn't possibly have worse traffic, and motorcycles were forbidden in them for fear of drive-by motorcycle gunners) so their motorcycles were transported via truck. Lots of problems but eventually they were allowed to proceed onward to Turkmenistan, perched on the edge of the Karakum Desert across which they would have to travel. 

Then to Uzbekistan, the country that is the world's largest silk producer, and the country that was the half-way point of the 7 bikers' trip. Onward to Kyrgyzstan and most notably to Kara-Kul in the northwest where there are soaring mountains, alpine meadows and cooler temperatures. Close is the beautiful Lade Issyk-Kul, the second highest navigable alpine lake in the world after Lake Titicaca in Peru. Jo had swum in Lake Titicaca two years previous on another tour, and she attempted to take a dip in Lake Issyk-Kul in memory of her previous swim.

Of course they had chances to try the many exotic foods on the regions they passed through. In Kyrgyzstan is was the kumys, the fermented mare's milk popular among the nomads and which Marco had reported favorably that the drink tasted like white wine. The 7 heartily disagreed!

To China. One of the most amazing highlight in China was in Dunhuang, known for the famous Mogao Grottoes, or the Caves of 1000 Buddhas, which is a structure carved into a rocky cliff-face at the edge of the Lop Nor Desert. The Buddhas trace back to the first which was carved in AD366 when a Buddhist monk carved one Buddha figure into a rock. Over the ensuing 1500 years, more Buddhas were added, but not only Buddhas as the name suggests, but also the life of the local people. In the 20th century a chamber was discovered containing thousands of manuscripts which had been sealed since the 11th century. Unfortunately, explorers from England, Germany, Russia and more countries pillaged the place, dispersing artifacts around the globe but leaving the caves as empty shells, but ones which continue to whisper the reminders of great secrets from Chinese antiquity.

Continuing onward out of the desert great mounds of packed earth started appearing ... remnants of the ancient Great Wall which ended in the desert and which in their entirety were built over a period of 1500 years. This amazing wall eventually was over 10,000 kilometers in distance, but despite the great expanse, the beacon towers could relay a message of attack, fire, emergency from the furthest-most tower in the desert back to Peking in less than 30 minutes! 

Of course they cycled to Xian, the capital of China until Kubla Khan (Marco's Great Khan), the man who shifted the reins of command to Peking in the 14th century. They viewed the 2000-year-old, life-sized warriors guarding the royal tomb that was discovered in 1974 by a farmer digging a well. The 7 reckoned 300,000 workers were needed in this construction that took over 35 years to build.

From Xian to Mongolia, the end of the road. They headed to Shangdu, known to Marco as Xanadu and which, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan had his stately pleasure-dome. Once they got there, they were in trouble with the authorities as to their purpose in that town. And then they came to realize that Shangdu was not the old Xanadu but Yuanshangdu, 200 kilometers away, was. And off they sped to Yuanshangdu, where in 1275 Kublai Khan had received Niccolo and Maffeo Polo and Niccolo's boy, Marco. This was the town that marked the eastern limit of Kublai Khan's empire, which stretched right back the way they had come, to Hungary. This was the end of the Silk Riders enterprise. Since April, they had covered almost 20,000 kilometers, crossed two major deserts, dodged through a war zone, visited the three inland oceans of the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea, and traversed the entire distance from west to east of the Great Wall.

They saddled up and set off for Beijing, the city known as Khan-Balik, "the Lord's City", in Kublai Khan's day. Their journey culminated with a ceremonial banquet at the New Zealand embassy and well attended by members of the BMW owners' club. would be held in their honor for the completion of their journey.

For a 52:30 minute YouTube clip on their journey, watch "Silk Riders - Motorcycling tour in the footsteps of Marco Polo",  and their blog on their journey.

Mongolian Dzud

A group of my clever students not only put together a very well organized presentation on a current environmental issue, but they also introduced one that no one in the class had heard of before, including myself. Great job on all accounts! Requirements were to give a team presentation with each team member building on the previous person's data and each person using only 4-5 slides. All content was to have basic referencing and then after presenting, members were to have a Q&A on their presentation. Very impressive on all accounts. Thank you You Seung, Jae Min, Yu Jin and Eun Ji for allowing me to publish your work here. I love it!  ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

Weatherford, Jack. Ghengis Khan and the making of the modern world.  xxxv, 312 pp., illus., bibliogr. New York: Crown Publishers, 2004. $25.00 (hard), $14.95 (paper)

(book review - by Cheryl Magnant)

This historical ethnography of the Mongol people as hunters growing into the powerful nation of destroyers, conquerors and shapers of history under the leadership of Ghengis Khan is a carefully researched piece of scholarship divided historically into three parts.  For introduction, the author relates his personal research endeavors in the Mongolian steppes and gives a broad overview of how Mongols are perceived in the present age and how and from where commonly known perceptions and misconceptions of the Mongols have arisen.  The first part of the narrative tells of Ghengis Khan’s birth in 1162, his rise to power and his charisma as a leader and unifier of the steppe tribes into a founded nation in 1206, and then recounts many of his successes at expansionism until his death over twenty years later. The second part relates the further expansions of his immediate heirs and their entering the Mongol World War, which lasted five decades until his grandsons went to war with one another; the war was the beginning of the end of the great nation which ruled nearly half of the world from the Mongol steppes north to the dense forests of Russia, south to Vietnam and westward to the edges of modern western Europe, and deeply southward into India. The third part examines Mongolia’s century of peace and the effects the Global Awakening had on modern society in terms of political, commercial and military institutions. 

 

Following the three narratives is an epilogue giving a culturally emotional tribute to a newly discovered site located by the author and his scholarly companions; it is the location of Ghengis Khan’s wife’s kidnapping, the pivotal event which ignited Ghengis Khan into ingeniously changing a tribe into a nation.  Extensive chapter notes provide cross-referencing in English, when available, and other languages if not; all referenced foreign scripts have been Anglicized.  For Anglicizations within the narrative, Jack Weatherford provides a note on transliteration of the Mongol language and a glossary of Mongolian names and places appearing in the text.  His selected biography is replete with no less than one hundred and ninety-five references, followed by acknowledgments to the diversity of people in Mongolia, Russia, China and the United States, ranging from herders to parliament members, who assisted him in his years of research.  Throughout the ethnography, intermittent drawings depicting historical moments reflective of Mongolian art and culture appear by Dr. S. Badral of Chinggis Khaan University.  Finally, a several-paged index culminates this ethnography. 

Jack Weatherford’s premise in writing Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World is that through the influence of Ghengis Khan, contrary to popular belief, the world was not only threatened by his warring ingeniousness and revolutionary tactics but was also positively transformed.  Jack Weatherford writes about the ancient struggle between the hunter and the herder and portrays the triumph of the hunter in a revisionist history of Ghengis Khan reshaping civilization worldwide by conquering peoples but not destroying cultures.  Ironically, Ghengis Khan, an illiterate hunter who became Great Khan in his early forties, surrounded himself with scholars and skilled artisans of the conquered peoples and amalgamated their knowledge into his growing Mongol kingdom; thus, through his military thrusts primarily west and southward, he redistributed his newly gained knowledge and learned skills, and as a result, impacted world history by reshaping literature, language, art, music, erudition itself, methods of war, politics and diplomacy, commerce, philosophies, and, in fact, he was the first conqueror and ruler to successfully practice religious tolerance.  Ghengis Khan was a humanitarian who abolished torture, avidly sought out new technologies and forms of expertise, and as Great Khan, head of the Mongols, was representative architect of history.  His four male offspring were the dynasty founders of the Golden Horde in Russia, the Moghul Empire in India, the Ilkhanate in Persia and Iraq, and the Yuan Dynasty in China.  His blood legacy lasted for seven hundred thirty-one years until the last descendent, Alim Khan, was deposed as emir of Bukhara.  Yet, the legacy he gave the world was the foundation of modern civilization:  international paper currency, a postal system, technologies such as printing, the compass and abacus, as well as the spread of merchandises.  Namely, the legacy he bestowed on civilization was the beginning of the homogenization of our present global village.

 

Mediaeval Commerce Asia - source

Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World is a theoretical narrative of historical events which took place eight centuries previous.  Extensive passage of time and translation concerns of The Secret History of the Mongol raise some questions as to the exactness of the events reconstructed in this ethnology, especially as The Secret History of the Mogols was written for the royal Mongol family significantly after Ghengis Khan’s death.  Over a period of five years Jack Weatherford researched and took cultural journeys through the “Great Taboo,” Ghengis Khan’s homeland and forbidden burial site.  Through careful readings of the more than a dozen language translations of The Secret History of the Mongols, Jack Weatherford, self-confessed as lacking proficiency in the Mongol language, along with two renowned Mongolian scholars, Professor Kh. Lkhagvasuren, archeologist, and Professor O. Sukhbaater, geographer, retraced the steps of Ghengis Khan in the same inclement weather as was presented in The Secret History of the Mongols.  Vast discrepancies between the translations became apparent as well as the difficulty in deciphering the context of relocating non-geographically named sites.  Other names appear to be in code or allude to places and events of common knowledge at the time but about which have been lost in the intervening centuries.  Due to harsh weather, the steppes are ever-changing and topographical landmarks have been erased or defaced, making positive identification difficult.  Transliterations of names into English alone also inhibit the preciseness demanded of empirical research; however, Jack Weatherford presents several names of controversial spelling and, explaining his choice in selecting one, systematically uses it throughout his narrative. 

 

The Secret History of the Mongols is a cultural tool, describing even the weepings of the Great Khan; nevertheless, there exists one cultural aspect that leaves gaps in the understanding of peoples of non-Mongolian backgrounds:  the topic of death, which is still not culturally discussed in Mongolia today.  As a result, a mystical vagueness surrounds the death and burial of Ghengis Khan, and no matter how scholarly or technical the searching may become, the steppes will never bring to light his disguised-by-trampling burial site.  Jack Weatherford, already holding a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, yet, owing to his five years of extensive research with the steppe scholars and an additional year of literary research on Mongolia at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota where he is the Dewitt Wallace Professor, was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humanities from the Chinggis Khaan College in Mongolia for his scholarly research on Mongolia and Ghengis Khan.  His most recent ethnography, Ghengis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, is imbued with Jack Weatherford’s insightful steppe-life cultural experiences which clarify presupposed cultural knowledge in the recently corrected and translated The History of the Mongols: The Life and Times of Chinggis Khan (2001) by Urgunge Onon.  The books counterbalance each other.  The History of the Mongols focuses on the past and is a cultural translation from the original Uighur script into English, whereas Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World not only explores Mongolia’s ancient history but also ties in the ancient past with the modern present. 

 

Cheryl Magnant

Marco Polo - Mysticized Adventurer

The book Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu told of the adventures of Marco Polo, one of the many Venetians who was a traveler and/or a merchant in 13th century Byzantine Venetia, the ungated city protected by lagoons and swamps, and easily guarded against from raids by the rapacious Genoese rivals and marauding Arabs. At the age of 17 Marco joined his father as his father returned to the Far East overland, and although the father spent many more adventurous years traveling Asia and far unknown reaches, it is Marco that became known for his adventures in the court of Kublai Khan and for traveling the Silk Road, which by the way, was not a distinct entity until christened so in 1877 when Baron Ferdinand von Richtofen, a German geographer, conceived the name through the artificial imagery of Seidenstrasse, a name suggesting romance, luxury and sensuality combined with arduous travel and dangerous undertakings.

Marco Polo actually did not compile his own book or memoir but while held as a captive in Genoa was discovered by Rustichello of Pisa who listened to the tales of heroism, woe and violence, and exotic experiences and wrote them for publication in a book entitled Travels. The writer doesn't seem to question that the tales do not always agree with each other or that some tales are feasibly impossible for the human to do, or even if the tales were ones that Marco heard or spun or were in fact his own experiences, but that seems to be a moot point as the tales did enrapture audiences and provided lively entertainment for a people thirsty for news outside of their own sphere of hard labor and daily survival.

Marco's early tales include Armenians and Nestorians, Jacobites, Georgians and Persians, as well as the Tartars and other nations who had been converted by the Christians to Christianity because the new converts were allowed great license to sin. Marco was fascinated by the merchants of Tabriz, who didn't haggle aloud in public lest they be overheard but bargained by squeezing each other's wrists or fingertips to describe and dispute the quality of items, convey the amount of the bid offered, and to communicate acceptance of a bid. The further east Marco went, the more bizarre and laughably ludicrous the tales seemed. Despite that, Marco continue to spin and war was a frequent theme.

Although Marco saw the havoc and destruction wreaked in the trail of the rampaging Genghis Khan in Badkhshan and elsewhere, he regarded Genghis (the name is derived from the Turkic word 'tengiz' which meant 'ocean' signifying great breadth and depth) as greater even than Alexander the Great in his accomplishments. Marco interacted mostly and served Genghis's grandson Kublai Khan, who having a Nestorian Christian mother, was raised to be very open-minded to religious differences and to ultimately practice religious tolerance. Kublai was also tutored by a monk of Chinese Buddhism, received instruction by Confucians, Turkish Uighurs, Muslims and Nestorian Christians, and his court was an eclectic gathering of people from many nations and skills. Despite religious tolerance, Marco does mention a system of who received the most trust and the Mongols were the most trusted in the court, followed by the Colored-eye People (meaning the Persians and Middle Easterners), then the Northern Chinese and finally the Southern Chinese, which ironically were the most numerous of vassals but those having the least influence.

Although the Mongols were a nomadic tribe relocating twice a year to richer pasturage for their horses, camels and other livestock, Kublai Khan's seat of power was "the great city called Cambulac" where he wintered. When Genghis had ruled, Karkorum on the Mongolian Steppe was the capital, but Kublai in keeping with centralizing his authority to superimpose a Mongolian civilization on the vassal Chinese, oversaw the construction of Cambulac. Work commenced in 1267 and was completed several years later. The great city featured eleven gates guarded by imposing three-storey towers and was called in Chinese as Ta-tu, "Great Capital", but known to the Turks as Khanbalikh, which Marco spelled 'Cambulac' or 'City of the Khan'. The Mongols, adapting the Chinese name, called it Daidu, and Daidu has since undergone many name changes but is now called "Beijing". The Forbidden City was the heart of this city.

In 1271, the year before Marco arrived, Kublai Khan's Chinese engineer and astronomer utilized Persian diagrams to build instruments and developed a new Mongol calendar, one based on a 12-year cycle with each year represented by a distinct animal to characterize the year: cow, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, cock, dog, or pig. For example, following this new ideology the year of the monkey is a difficult year as the passage of time in the year symbolized simian traits like rambunctiousness and being high-strung. Marco estimated that in Cambulac alone no fewer than five thousand astrologers and soothsayers plied their trade according to their own religious beliefs and cultural backgrounds - Muslims, Christians, Chinese principally.

Everywhere Marco went in his travels in China for Kublai Khan, he encountered silk worms which were a mysterious secret even to the Chinese. Europe at this time knew nothing about the art and science of sericulture, a closely guarded ancient secret. Traditions credits Xi Ling-shi - wife of the mythical Yellow Emperor who supposedly ruled China in 3000 BC - with the introduction of silkworm cultivation along with the invention of the loom. Although she was a phantom, silk was not and archaeological digs have revealed silk threads, ribbons, and cocoons dating from 3000 BC, not to mention a small ivory cup dating the same time and having images of spinning tools as well as silk thread. And in Marco's travels, he estimated that the labor-intensive production of silk occupied half of China's provinces, but he was not to discover any significant facts about sericulture as giving knowledge of silkworm production was an offense punishable by death if such secrets were revealed to a foreigner, or even if the cocoons or eggs were transported across Chinese borders as the favored and state-secret of the carefully developed and unique Bombyx mori which produced a rounder and smoother thread than other species was nationally protected.

Brutality, as we in the modern label it, was cultural and each culture had a unique form of extermination of the enemy. An enemy or even a traitor would have hot stones forced down his/her throat [this is how marmots are still cooked - the traditional way - in Mongolia, as Mongolia has virtually no wood for fuel so dung and grasses and burned, heating stones which are then dropped down the marmots throat to cook the marmot from the inside out.] Nayan, one of Kublai's uncles, rebelled again Kublai and wanted to become the Great Khan himself, and so a major battle ensued in which Nayan was defeated. As punishment, Nayan was wrapped tightly in a carpet and violently drug until he died. As Marco puts it, "Their object in choosing the mode of death was so that the blood of the imperial lineage might not be spilt upon the earth, and the sun and the air might not witness it, nor the limbs of Nayan be touched by any animal."

Upon Marco Polo's return to Venitia, people regarded Marco's tales of technological advances with disbelief, but eventually adopted the technology. Paper money was virtually unknown in the West until Marco's return, whereupon it revolutionized finance and commerce. Coal, which had captured Marco's attention is China, soon provided a new and relatively efficient means of heating. Eyeglasses (round lenses actually) became accepted and led to the rise of both the microscope and the telescope, the latter which in turn revolutionized naval battles. Gunpowder, which the Chinese had been using for three centuries, markedly changed one-on-one personal combat to fighting impersonally and yet causing more destruction to the enemy. Marco did indeed start the bridge building of later cultural and technological exchange for a technologically developing society.

The West is still enamored with the exotic tales woven of his experiences, his father's experiences, and tales he gathered and spoke of as if they were his own. Authors like Coleridge further mystify the adventures of Marco in his poem Kublai Khan. Coleridge opens with:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately prince dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

And concludes with a warning of the dangers of unrestrained rapture, imagining himself or a kindred spirit crying out:

Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Hmmm, I don't think many people would consider the koulis, the fermented milk of the Mongols, as the milk of Paradise ... but there you have it, exoticizing the unknown and making ts alluring, mysterious and something to be desired.