In Dec of 2014, Netflix premiered its new historical drama Marco Polo to considerable fanfare. The reaction to the series has not been particularly positive. One reviewer termed it “The Most Gorgeous Thing You’ll Ever Fall Asleep To,” while another called it “practically binge-proof.” Rotten Tomatoes sums up the criticism as “an all-around disappointment.” The show has also been criticized for its reliance of Orientalizing stereotypes and flat characterizations. There are enough naked concubines to populate a porn film or ten, and half the characters know kung fu, including a few of the aforesaid concubines.And who knew that archery was a standard element in the education of Chinese women?
Despite these not-undeserved complaints, I kind of like the show. The sets, costumes, and scenery are uniformly gorgeous. It’s refreshing to see a western television show that allows so many Asian and Middle Eastern actors to play major roles; there’s only one white main character. And I have to cheer a show that tries to bring a relatively unknown (to American audiences at least) culture to life; it’s sort of refreshing that the white guy isn’t the interesting part of the show (although given that he’s the main character, there’s definitely a problem from a story-telling perspective). What so many critics deride as a slow pace can also be seen as trusting the audience to let the story unfold. So while the show has some major faults (like its rather bland main character), it also has enough virtues to make it worth watching. And it’s better than Reign, which has to be worth something.
I’ve hesitated to tackle Marco Polo for the simple reason that it’s a very long way outside my knowledge base. As an undergraduate, I took one course on ancient Chinese history, and apart from a little side reading from time to time, that’s as much formal instruction on China as I’ve ever gotten. I lack the background to comment intelligently on the physical culture of the show; the costumes and sets look gorgeous, but I simply don’t know how historically accurate they are.
Nevertheless, the show is in the public eye at the moment, so I’ll venture to critique some of the basic facts of the series.
Marco Polo and His Travels
Marco Polo (1254-1324) was a Venetian merchant of the later 14th century. His father Niccolo and uncle Maffeo had traveled along the Silk Road to China in 1260 and then returned to Venice in 1269. Two years later, they set out for China again, taking the 17-year-old Marco with them, finally arriving in China around 1275. Marco returned, quite wealthy, to Venice in 1295, only to find his home city at war with Genoa. Marco used his wealth to outfit a ship for the Venetian navy, only to get captured by the Genoese.
Marco Polo
While in prison, Marco dictated his memoires to another inmate, who added various other stories and details to Polo’s recollections. The result was a book known in English as The Travels of Marco Polo, something of a medieval best-seller. While Polo is the source of much of the material, he is not truly its author in a modern sense; nor was there a fixed text for the book, since it went through various revisions.
Scholars have long debated the historical reliability of the text. Polo claims that he, his father, and his uncle all became important officials in the court of Kublai Khan, but there is no mention of him (at least under that name) in the Chinese records of the period (records which mention a large number of foreigners). Some of his stories are clearly wild exaggerations, such as birds large enough to pick up elephants, and he makes several mentions of the legendary Christian king Prester John. Despite being a skilled linguist, he gives no sign of having learned Chinese. Some scholars claim that Polo never made it to China and instead cribbed his knowledge of the region from Arabic sources, while other scholars have argued that his work shows enough knowledge of the details of the Chinese economy to demonstrate its reliability. So the final verdict of the veracity of Polo’s tales has yet to be delivered, but Polo himself is a solidly historical character and he certainly claimed to have spent a long time in China.
Marco Polo in the Series
The series is, I think, unintentionally the beneficiary of the ambiguous historicity of Polo’s Travels. Although the show does not attempt to stick to Polo’s actual text but simply mines it for interesting material, the show can be understood more as a tall tale by Marco Polo than as a strict retelling of history (which is a good thing, because the series gets a lot of the history badly wrong). That way the show’s wire-fu stunts and lurid sexuality can be read more as Polo’s fantasies than as fact. Of course, if they had really wanted the show to be read this way, they would have added a voice-over narration.
The show opens with Marco Polo (Lorenzo Richelmy) sitting on a roof in Venice (in what might be a nod to Assassin’s Creed fans) when his father’s ship sails into harbor. Marco loves drawing on paper, apparently have free access to what is literally cutting-edge technology, since the first known paper mill in Italy wasn’t established until the mid-1270s. Marco meets Niccolo (Pierfrancesco Favino) for the first time, which is accurate.
Richelmy as Tyrion Lannister Marco Polo
The show glosses over Polo’s journey from Venice to Khanbalik (modern Beijing) in a few minutes, saying that the journey took about 3 years, when in fact it took about 5, but I suppose we can’t complain that they wanted to get to the Mongols right away. Niccolo literally gives Marco to Kublai Khan (Benedict Wong) to curry favor with him because the khan is angry that instead of bringing back Christian priests, the Polos have only brought a bottle of oil from the Holy Sepulchre. (That’s kinda sorta what actually happened. The khan had ordered the Pope to send 100 priests and a bottle of oil from the Holy Sepulchre, but he only got the bottle of oil. But the bit about Niccolo giving him Marco is made up.)
Wong as Kublai
Kublai decides, apparently because he knows that Marco is the main character of the show, to make sure he gets a good education, and orders him trained in riding, falconry, calligraphy, archery, and martial arts. The series’ time-frame is unclear, but Polo seemingly becomes moderately proficient in all of these things (except falconry) in the space of a few months. This is pretty improbable; apart from the near impossibility of anyone acquiring those skills so quickly, Polo probably already knew how to ride a horse (he had just spent years journeying along the Silk Road, after all), and almost certainly wouldn’t be able to master Chinese calligraphy, a highly complex art-form, when he didn’t even know Chinese. Nor is there any evidence that Polo fought at all. But let’s just chalk all that up to the need to have the hero actually be able to do action-y stuff in an action series. (And, in all fairness, he actually does fairly poorly in most of his fight scenes, so I suppose the show is acknowledging the improbability to Polo becoming a great fighter after a few fighting lessons.)
Polo’s father and uncle get caught trying to smuggle silk worms out of China hidden in a hollow staff, and this gives Marco probably his most interesting plot-line, in which he is given permission to decide their punishment for himself. This is a remarkably silly story-line. In 551 AD, a pair of Christian monks actually did smuggle silk worms out of China, eventually getting to the Byzantine Empire, where a thriving silk industry sprung up, forming a major feature of Byzantine diplomacy until the 1140s, when King Roger II of Sicily attacked the Byzantines and literally stole the entire silk industry from them, bringing it back to Sicily, where it quickly spread to the rest of Italy. If the Polos thought they could get rich smuggling silk worms from China to Italy in the 1270s, they had a rather defective business plan, since it would be the equivalent of trying to make a killing by smuggling cars into Detroit.
Fun with Siege Weaponry
Toward the end of the season, Polo helps the Mongols conquer Xiangyang, the last remaining holdout city of the Song dynasty (I’ll tackle the problem with that in the next post). He teaches the Mongols how to build counterweight trebuchets. While this detail has been mocked in a few reviews I’ve read, it’s not quite as wrong as it might seem. While Song and Yuan China enjoyed some impressive technological developments in comparison to 13th century Europe, one place that it lagged behind was in the development of siege warfare, in part because China had fewer major fortresses than Europe. In the Travels, Polo claims that his father and uncle had provided the designs for trebuchets at the siege of Xiangyang; this is highly unlikely, since they were not engineers and were not in fact in China during the siege. (Most scholars think the khan got Persian engineers to build them.) So the show is getting two things wrong; Polo never claims that he personally designed the trebuchets, and it’s unlikely any of the Polos gave the idea to the Mongols. However, given that Marco does actually claim that his family gave the Mongols trebuchets, it’s a small modification to make Marco the one who did it.
Polo’s trebuchets with the mandatory flaming clichés
A more serious problem happens with the trebuchets, however. Marco actually calibrates the range of the trebuchets, and figures out that they need a longer firing arm to reach the distances he wants. Such a feat was impossible for him. The range of a trebuchet is highly variable based on three factors: the length of the firing arm, the weight of the stone being fired and the weight of the counter-weight driving the firing arm. While modern engineering students, armed with a knowledge of Newtonian physics, can do a reasonable job calculating the range of a trebuchet, despite its rather counter-intuitive arc of fire, medieval engineers, lacking this knowledge, could not reliably calibrate a trebuchet, nor is it likely that they clearly understood the relationship between the length of the level arm and the range. Medieval trebuchets required a great deal of trial and error after they were set up, and hitting the same spot of wall repeatedly was virtually impossible. I’m also skeptical that trebuchets would actually be able to break through the walls of Xiangyang, given how thick the walls are in the show, but maybe that’s why I’m an historian going to the movies and not an engineer going to the movies (which, come to think of it, would be a cool blog too.)
Finally, the Mongols assemble the trebuchets near Khanbalik apparently and then drag them the roughly 650 miles to Xiangyang, instead of doing the sensible thing and carrying them disassembled, which would be much easier. But I suppose if you’re Kublai Khan, you can afford to show off your power by being an asshole to your troops that way.
Incidentally, here’s a little fun raw footage of the trebuchet scene
An Historian Goes to the Movies 
A thing that’s notable about the show, and actually maybe notable about history in general, is its use of kung fu — Marco Polo’s trainer does do a pretty good job of describing what “kung fu” is (a sort of mastery through serious study of a skill or practice), but it also seems to rely pretty heavily on what we generally call “wushu”, which are particular styles of fighting. I think in one of the early episodes, the chancellor even uses Northern Praying Mantis to defeat someone who has mastered “The Five Animals of Shaolin” (presumably a reference to either Shaolin style kung fu or Hung Gar kung fu).
The thing, though, is that there’s no evidence of these sort of monk-run, scholastic forms of martial arts training before the Ming Dynasty. There were books about how to fight (mostly relating to archery and swords, I think), but any reference to pre-Ming kung fu is exclusively a creation of a later date that was projected backward (Northern Mantis is a good example of this; while there’s no historical evidence of it before the Qing Dynasty, its own legends date it as a creation of the Song Dynasty).
So, it’s weird to see it in Yuan Dynasty China; I was a little unhappy about this, because I think it’d be okay if, for once, we did a story about Chinese culture that did NOT have people just kung fuing around all the time. But it also brings up a pretty interesting point I think about how we use history as a narrative tool in the present tense, to legitimaze beliefs (or, in this case, wushu systems).
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Braak: a very, very good point. You clearly know more about the history of martial arts than I do. My understanding is that they were much less widely distributed than the show suggests; few members of the court would have known them.
This is part of what the whole critique of the show being ‘orientalizing’ is about. It’s a fantasy of Asian culture as much as it is a serious attempt to depict actual Yuan culture.
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Well, wushu in the Ming and later periods is…weird. I’m not sure I know of anything else quite like it. Prior to the Ming Dynasty, though, it’s more likely that it was the other way around — pretty much only members of the court would have had access to them. At that point in history, martial arts more closely resembled what you’d see in the west, with masters and trainers and manuals (usually for individual weapons like sword, spear, and especially archery, which was very important to the Chinese aristocracy) pretty much exclusively available to people who had the money and leisure for them.
So, Marco Polo learning to fight from the Khan’s personal fight master is somewhat less weird (though it is a little weird that they’re using the dao, which was customarily an infantry weapon, rather than the jian) than that fight between chancellor Song and some random soldier who knows the secrets of Shaolin, or how his prostitue sister is a master of naked backflip kung fu.
And it’s actually those parts that bother me most, becuase of how it feeds into this idea that you can pick any random Chinese guy out of a lineup and ask him what his kung fu style is and he’ll have one. Principally, I guess I don’t have any problem with sort of cod-Asian fantasy cultures, except for the fact that Travels of Marco Polo and actual historical Yuan Dynasty China both have a surfeit of really interesting aspects, I’m not sure what anyone gains by making up a bunch of stuff.
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“If the Polos thought they could get rich smuggling silk worms from China to Italy in the 1270s, they had a rather defective business plan, since it would be the equivalent of trying to make a killing by smuggling cars into Detroit.”
I’m glad you pointed this out, as it bothered me immensely too.
This show looks gorgeous, but is far too sensationalistic and anachronistic to be enjoyable.
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Congratulations for the great posts! But I just have some minor corrections.
The Chinese were actually very advanced in siege warfare in the period considered, and in fact innovated much more than their western counterparts for a long while. Of special mention here is the huge quickstart in gunpowder weaponry, exemplified by the first and widely used cannons, landmines, naval mines, fire arrows, continuous flamethrowers, explosives and even more. Just check this page, there are rich descriptions of many siege weapons in Chinese history, despite not being the most complete source available in English (I strongly recommend parts 6 and 7 from the 5th volume of Needham’s Science and Civilization in China).
http://www.grandhistorian.com/chinesesiegewarfare/index-english12122007.html
You should have said that they have innovated less in catapults. I would agree with that in a way, but still there are many types of catapults developed by the Chinese in the medieval times, and we should consider yet that they experimented widely with chemical warfare, using it in the projectiles of their catapults. So they also innovated widely in catapults, albeit not using widely the counterweight trebuchet before the siege of Xingyang (it’s also possible that Qiang Shen from Jin Dynasty have developed some kind of counterweight trebuched and even employed it against the mongols). Lets consider also that the counterweight trebuchet, like any other weapon, have advantages and disadvantages. For example, despite having more range than the traditional trebuchet, it is much less versatile. But yes, overall it is a great development.
You also said that they had less major fortresses, and this would be the cause of the non-appearance of the counterweight trebuchet. Well, we don’t have any comparative data on the quantities of fortresses at those two regions of the world at a given time, do we? On the other hand, their fortresses dwarfed anything built in Europe at the time, so I don’t think this is a good explanation. Maybe the Byzantines came up with the counterweight trebuchet because it was more suited for the Mediterranean terrain? Well, it is surely an interesting question. But lets not forget that it could be simply purely a casual invention, made by the right mind at the right time.
Greetings from Brazil.
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Gabriel: it’s quite clear that later medieval Europe had far more fortifications than China did–medieval Europe is dotted with small private castles as well as numerous fortified cities, whereas China is characterized by large urban fortresses only. The argument is that the proliferation of privately-held castles and private warfare encouraged innovation in siege warfare by providing much more opportunity and incentive for innovation. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that we have quantitative data on the numbers of fortresses in these regions. Western archaeologists devote a great deal of energy to counting and mapping such things, so I’m guessing it’s been done in China as well.
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Hi aelarsen,
Yes, I agree intuitively that Europe a much greater number of fortresses than China, but would it be suficient to explain the appearance of the counterweight trebuchet in the former but not in the later? Well, your argument about the opportunities is surely interesting but does not provide enough detail. Also, the fortifications of China were many orders of magnitude larger than the typical european ones, so should we not expect, I could argue, the development of accordingly greater siege engines, considering that Song Dynasty was mainly facing sedentary enemies?
Also, the counterweight trebuchet was invented by the Bizantines in the High Middle Ages, no later than the 11-12th century. Even more, it was not initially used between the feudal kingdoms of Western Europe, but against the Seljuk turks, if I’m not mistaken.
And the period of innovation you refer to is the Late Middle Ages. Before that, despite Europe having a great number of fortifications, China was definitelly innovating more in siege warfare, partly because of the wars against the Jin, Liao, etc. The mongol conquest of Song Dynasty have slowed the trend of innovations in China, at the same time Europe was experiencing a scientific revival and a greater number of major wars.
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