Xanadu: John Man

Copies of the book will be available at RAS events prior to this meeting. You may also obtain a copy of the book by contacting the RAS Book Club (see below).

Entrance: RMB 70.00 (RAS Members) and RMB 100.00 (non-members) including a drink (tea, coffee, soft drink, or glass of wine). Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to this RAS Book Club event. Member applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.

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It was summer when the young Venetian Marco Polo arrived in northeastern China after his long eastward trek, so it was here in Shangdu that he found the imperial court, and the Great Khan himself. Polo would remain in Kublai's service 17 years, in court at Beijing and Shangdu, traveling on imperial business, taking a local concubine, and spending a spell perhaps as a provincial governor. Along the way he amassed such considerable wealth.

John Man tracks Polo's journey to China, his stay and his eventual return to Europe, through the traces they have left behind. Man himself travels to Shangdu and Beijing, and explores the possible routes between the two, forsaking the library in the search for "ground-truth". On his explorations he is accompanied by Wei Jian, an experienced Shangdu archaeologist; but he calls on others, too, including some long-dead westerners who travelled the same routes in the centuries between Polo's and our own. Through their and Polo's descriptions and some clever triangulation, Man convincingly recreates many centuries of construction and decay: towns built, and crumbling to ruin, bits of walls now covered over by sand drifts; relics found and lost again; once broad lakes lately dried up.

What Man presents, then, is a version – a narrative that can be constructed from the surviving evidence, but which is tantalizingly speculative, constantly reminding itself of how many other ways the clues might be read. Polo might be telling the truth; or concealing it for some political or personal expediency; or reporting hearsay. Man makes his choices, turn by turn, and from them constructs his narrative.

It's largely well-trodden ground – each element of the story has been well told before, often by Man himself in earlier books. What he has written here is a rather fragmentary assembly, but what keeps these fragments together is Man himself. He is constantly visible in his book – sometimes as an onsite character striding into his own story, sometimes as a conspicuous narrator – and his presence is very welcome. It helps, in part, to hold together what might otherwise feel uncentered, to keep it coherent, as an engaging piece of storytelling and a very companionable journey of exploration.

John Man is a historian and travel writer with a special interest in Mongolia. His Gobi: Tracking the Desert was the first book on the subject in English since the 1920s. He is also the author of Atlas of the Year 1000, Alpha Beta, on the roots of the Roman alphabet, and The Gutenberg Revolution, on the origins and impact of printing. His most recent books include The Terracotta Army, Genghis Khan: Life, Death, and Resurrection and Attila: The Barbarian King Who Challenged Rome.