🐪 c. 1271 AD | Marco Polo on the Silk Road What you’re seeing:
A reconstruction of a 13th-century merchant leading a loaded Bactrian camel across a high Central Asian plain. The worn cloak, hood and dusty track stand in for the long overland journeys between the Middle East, Persia and China. Where is this?
A dry steppe along one branch of the Silk Road, somewhere between the Iranian plateau, the Pamir Mountains (Central Asia) and the Tarim Basin (Xinjiang, western China). Routes like this linked the Mediterranean world to the Mongol Empire’s inner heartlands. Who is this traveler meant to represent?
This is our reconstruction of Marco Polo, a young merchant from Venice, travelling east with the kind of caravan that could have carried him across Central Asia toward the Mongol court. Why did Marco Polo travel east?
His family were Venetian merchants already trading with the Mongols. They returned east to strengthen those ties and answer requests from Kublai Khan (Mongol emperor and...