Marco Polo: A Tall Tale for the Modern West

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Bayan Hundred Eyes, Chin Han, Genghis Khan, Jia Sidao, Kokachin, Kublai Khan, Lorenzo Richelmy, Marco Polo, Mongol China, The Mongols, Tom Wu, Zhu Zhu

Netflix’ Marco Polo series made quite a splash, drawing attention for its lavish sets, enormous budget (it’s reportedly the second-most expensive television series ever), and its rather lack-luster showing with critics. But, as I commented last time, I think it deserves some credit for trying to bring a little-known period and setting to Western audiences. The fact that the Mongols are well-known but little known-about in the West gives the series considerable room to play fast and loose with the facts, a bit the way the original source material probably does.

The Mongols

The Mongol tribes were first unified by Temujin, who assumed the title Genghis Khan (“Universal Leader”) in 1206. He began expanding, pushing westward into central Asia, parts of Persia, and modern Russia. To the east, he had to deal with China, but fortunately for him, China was politically disunited. The Jin Dynasty had broken northern China away from the Song Dynasty (who were forced to relocated their capital to southern China, and are thereafter known as the Southern Song) about a century earlier, and western China was ruled by the Xi Xia Dynasty. Genghis forced the Xi Xia into submission, and after a rebellion, completely destroyed and absorbed the territory in 1227, shortly before his death the same year.

Genghis Khan, as depicted by a 14th century Chinese artist

As was the Mongol tradition, leaders were elected at a kurultai held at the Mongol capital of Karakorum, which required the presence of all the major members of the ruling family. (The Mongol state functioned a bit like a federation whose branches were ruled by members of the same family, with a senior member presiding over all of the parts.) Genghis was succeeded by his third son Ogedei, who in 1234 conquered the Jin Dynasty. On the western end of the growing Mongol Empire, his nephew Batu had largely conquered western Russia and the Caucasus region. Ögedei attempted an invasion of modern India, but was forced to retreat. In 1241, just before Batu was to invade eastern Europe, Ögedei died and Batu and the other Mongol princes were forced to return to Mongolia for a kurultai to choose his successor, thus sparing most of Europe a Mongol invasion it would probably have been unable to withstand.

China at the time of the Mongol invasion

In the two decades that followed, the various Mongol princes struggled over who would rule the Empire. First Ögedei’s son Güyük and then a cousin, Möngke, gained power. Möngke sought to purge the sons of Ögedei to secure his own branch of the family’s position. He attempted the conquest of the Southern Song, but died of disease in 1259 during the campaign, forcing the withdrawal of the Mongols to choose a new khan at a new kurultai.

At this point, the two main contenders were Möngke’s brothers Hulagu and Kublai, neither of whom was actually in Mongolia. Their brother Ariq Böke manged to get himself elected, but Kublai convened his own kurultai in China and had himself elected. That produced a civil war between Kublai and Ariq Böke. Ultimately in 1264, Ariq Böke surrendered. This rift was an expression of a growing cultural divide between what might be seen as the ‘Sinicizing Mongols’, who followed Kublai and found some elements of Chinese culture worthy of adopting, and ‘traditional Mongols’, who supported Ariq Böke and felt that the Sinicizing Mongols were becoming soft and unmongolian. Ariq Böke’s legacy was taken up by Kaidu, his nephew and successor.

Kublai Khan, by a Chinese artist

In 1271, Kublai declared the new Yuan Dynasty in China, as a way of seeking support from the Chinese. He relocated his capital from Karakorum to Khanbalik (modern Beijing), despite considerable opposition from the traditionalists, who rallied around Kaidu.

While this was going on, the old Southern Song Emperor Duzong died in 1274 and was succeeded by his four-year-old son Zhao Xian as Emperor Gong. His paternal grandmother, the Dowager Empress Xie, acted as regent, while the Chancellor Jia Sidao controlled the army and much of the state bureaucracy. Sidao came to power reportedly because his sister was a concubine of Duzong’s father. He was extremely popular with Duzong, who insisted on standing up when he entered the room, much to the scandal of the court.

Jia Sidao

Finally, in 1273, Kublai’s forces, aided by a pair of Persian engineers, captured the Southern Song capital of Xiangyang. Sidao had managed to hide the military crisis from the court, and as a consequence was widely accused of corruption and incompetence; a particular charge was that his fondness for cricket fighting had distracted him from the more serious military problems at hand.

After the court fled Xiangyang and ensured a subsequent defeat at Yihu, Sidao was forced out of office and then murdered in 1275, despite Xie’s objections. The next year, the Song rulers finally surrendered to Kublai. Xie and Zhao Xian were sent to live at Khanbalik and Zhao was given the honorific title of Duke of Ying. He eventually was sent to Tibet, where he became a Buddhist monk. As an old man in 1323, his poetry incurred the displeasure of one of Kublai’s successors and he was forced to commit suicide.

During Kublai’s conquest of the Southern Song, one of his most important generals was Bayan Chingsang. Marco Polo refers to him as “Bayan Hundred Eyes”, probably a mistranslation of the Chinese form of ‘Bayan’. Bayan was probably a Mongol; he married a niece of Empress Chabi. He remained a very important figure at Kublai’s court, and his support enabled Kublai’s son Timur to succeed to the throne in 1294.

Marco Polo

If you’ve seen the series, you’ll recognize much of the preceding summary, but very distorted. The historical Marco Polo arrived in China in 1275 or 76, well after the capture of Xiangyang, but the cinematic Marco (Lorenzo Richelmy) arrives in 1273, well before the capture of Xiangyang. That means that all the events of the first season happen in the space of perhaps half a year or a little more, which strains plausibility, given the considerable distances that Polo travels after he gets to China (just his journey to seek out the Old Man of the Mountain takes at least 3 weeks one way, according to the episode in which it happens).

The first major crisis in the series is the rebellion of Ariq Böke, which in fact happened almost a decade before Polo’s arrival. In the series Kublai kills his brother, but in fact the khan spared him, although he died later that year. When you put this together with the capture of Xiangyang, it’s clear that there’s no way to reconcile the events of the film with history; events are happening both too soon and too late.

An even bigger chronological mutilation involves Kokachin, the Blue Princess of the Bayaut. In the series, Marco sees Kokachin (Zhu Zhu) soon after his arrival at court, although it takes him a while to actually get a chance to speak with her. She explains that she is a princess of the Bayaut tribe, which was wiped out by Kublai. She is being kept at court until an appropriate marriage can be arranged for her, and by the end of the season, the decision has been made to wed her to Jingim, Kublai’s son and heir, which is a problem, because Marco is in love with her.

Kokachin the Blue Princess was a real person; when the Polos got permission to return to the west in 1296, their last service to the khan was to escort her to the Ilkhanate of Persia, a breakaway branch of the Mongol Empire under the rule of Hulegu’s descendants. She was 17 at the time, meaning that she was born around 1279. So the real Kokachin hadn’t even been born when Marco arrived at Khanbalik (making her Marco Polo‘s version of Isabella of France, I suppose). Also, Kublai did not wipe out the Bayaut tribe; they still exist today as one of the most important branches of the Mongolian people.

Zhu Zhu as Kokachin

The Mongol general Bayan has become Hundred Eyes (Tom Wu), a blind Chinese Taoist monk and martial arts expert. The character engages in a lot of cool wire-fu chop-socky and spouts a good deal of “ancient Chinese wisdom”, but his depiction is so far removed from historical reality as to bring the series perilously close to outright fantasy. It ought to be obvious that in the real world, blind men cannot routinely outfight sighted men or chop a piece of fruit into four pieces in mid-air, but as I’ve learned from the search history on my blog, there are a lot of people out there who suspect that such things might be plausible.

Tom Wu as Hundred Eyes, getting his kung fu on.

The series’ depiction of Jia Sidao is also problematic. They get some details about him right; he was the chancellor in the early 1270s and oversaw the defense of Xiangyang. His sister was reportedly an imperial concubine, and he was genuinely obsessed with crickets, earning him the derisive nickname the Cricket Minister. But whereas in the series Jia Sidao (Chin Han) is a master politician, cunning schemer, and powerful martial artist, the historical Jia Sidao is remembered more as an incompetent politician who owed his power to somewhat undeserved imperial favor and whose military screw-ups have sometimes been identified as the primary cause of the defeat of the Southern Song. The climactic battle between him on the one hand and Marco and Hundred Eyes on the other is entirely fictitious. (And would it have been so hard to get the whole cast to agree on one pronunciation of his name?)

Chin Han as Jia Sidao, demonstrating his martial arts awesomeness at a soldier’s expense

As I said, I think the best way to approach this series is to consider it neither a depiction of historical fact nor a version of the Travels of Marco Polo, since it doesn’t conform to the text very well, but simply as an alternative tall tale from Marco Polo, telling us a story that is exotic enough that he assumes we won’t realize just how much he’s making up and reworking the facts.

Correction: In an earlier draft of this essay, I referred to the Mongol general Subutai as a nephew of Genghis Khan. After being challenged on this by a couple of commenters, I looked into it more closely, and found conflicting statements on the issue. Since I’m not a Mongologist and can’t entirely evaluate the information for myself, I decided to be cautious and remove the reference to Subutai entirely. Sorry for the mistake.

Correction: In an earlier draft of this essay, I referred to Hulagu and Kublai as Mongke’s sons. They were in fact his brothers. I regret the mistake.

Marco Polo: West Meets East

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Benedict Wong, Kublai Khan, Lorenzo Richelmy, Marco Polo, Mongol China, Netflix, The Mongols

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 14^th 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 13^th 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