As this blog grew out of my other, Who specific, one - TARDIS Musings - I thought it might be time to devise a series of posts that link the two together. The TARDIS has visited many periods of Earth's history over the decades. What was the historical context to those stories? How accurate were they?
We will start way back in 1964 with the story known as Marco Polo - 7 episodes written by John Lucarotti, and directed by Waris Hussein. Lucarotti had written an epic series about Polo for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation a year or so before.
At this time, Doctor Who was intended to have a strong educational remit - helping to popularise History, Geography and Science. As well as learning about Polo and Kublai Khan, we also get to learn about the origins of the word "assassin", how condensation works, the original tale of Aladdin - when he was an old, evil character, rather than a young pantomime hero - and that bamboo explodes in fire, amongst many other things.
The TARDIS materialises in the foothills of the Himalayas, and promptly suffers from a power failure. The time travelers meet Marco Polo who is leading a caravan towards Cathay. There is a young girl heading for an arranged marriage in the party - and a Tartar Warlord named Tegana, supposedly on a peace mission but who really plans to assassinate Kublai Khan. Polo intends to keep the TARDIS and gift it to Kublai Khan so that he will finally be allowed to return home to Venice. They stop at many locations - it is one of the longest Doctor Who stories in narrative terms - before finally arriving in the capital, where Polo saves the Khan's life. He relents and lets the Doctor have the key to the TARDIS back, so the travelers escape onto their next adventure.
The story of Marco Polo is one we think we know very well - the 17 year old Venetian adventurer who traveled east with his father and uncle in 1271. He made himself indispensable to Kublai Khan and was not allowed to return home for more than 20 years.
We know all this from a small book, A Description of the World, published about 20 years after his death. The writer wasn't Polo himself. On returning to Venice in 1298, he found the city at war with Genoa. He was captured by the Genoese and spent a year in prison - sharing his cell with a man named Rusticello di Pisa. It was Rusticello who put the book together.
About 150 different variations of the book exist, and it is believed that a number of the stories attributed to Polo were additions from other sources - other travelers who had visited and traded with China. Some people think that Polo only ever got as far as Mongolia, and all of the Chinese sections are collected from other travelers' tales.
Suspicions arise because he does not mention tea-drinking, the Great Wall, foot-binding or chop-sticks. The main suspicion, however, is that the Chinese do not mention him - despite his spending two decades interacting with the highest levels of government. One of the reasons that the Chinese invented paper was to record their bureaucracy in the minutest detail - yet there is no mention of a Marco Polo. Other western travelers do get written about, and their travels are better documented.
His supporters claim that there are enough elements in the book that do demonstrate that Polo visited China - descriptions of paper money and salt production - for it to be a true account. Other writers omit things which you would expect to be mentioned, and the Great Wall as we know it today was actually built some 200 years after Polo's time. Kublai Khan ruled over a region on either side of the present Great Wall - so would have had no reason to build a barrier across the middle of it.
All agree that the book does include some sections that come from other sources - European and Muslim.
Basically, it is accurate but only up to a point.
Polo died in 1324, and is buried in the church of San Lorenzo in the Castello district of his native city. His will freed a Tartar slave whom he had brought back from his travels.
No comments:
Post a Comment