Walk the Travels of Marco Polo, Venice to Xanadu
A seventeen-year-old leaves Venice for the court of Kublai Khan. Your everyday steps follow the Polos across Asia on the roads that were there, and Marco's own account unlocks at the places he described.
- 7,184 miles
- 8 stops
- Marco Polo, c. 1300
Across Asia to the Khan
Polo left Venice at seventeen and came home at forty-one, then dictated this in a Genoese prison to a professional writer of romances. Deserts, coal, paper money, a khan with a summer palace — his contemporaries filed it under lies, and he was right about nearly all of it.
Marco Polo left Venice in 1271 with his father and uncle, and did not come home until 1295, when he was forty-one. They landed at Layas in Armenia, came down to Hormuz on the Persian Gulf meaning to sail, took one look at the ships and turned inland to walk instead. The route goes through Balkh, over the Pamirs, round the Taklamakan Desert and across the desert of Lop to the Khan's summer palace at Shangdu.
Shangdu is Xanadu: Coleridge was reading about it when he fell asleep and dreamed Kubla Khan. Polo dictated the book in a Genoese prison to Rustichello, a writer of romances, and readers at the time filed much of it under tall tales. He was right about nearly all of it. Sir Henry Yule's annotated translation is the classic English text.
- Distance
- 7,184 miles (11,562 km)
- Stops
- 8, each with its own passage and plate
- Map
- The real world, on Apple Maps
- Text
- Marco Polo, translated by Sir Henry Yule; Project Gutenberg ebook #10636
Where it starts
Great Princes, Emperors, and Kings, Dukes and Marquises, Counts, Knights, and Burgesses! and People of all degrees who desire to get knowledge of the various races of mankind and of the diversities of the sundry regions of the World, take this Book and cause it to be read to you. For ye shall find therein all kinds of wonderful things, and the divers histories of the Great Hermenia, and of Persia, and of the Land of the Tartars, and of India, and of many another country of which our Book doth speak.
The Travels of Marco Polo, Prologue · translated by Sir Henry Yule
This is the passage Bematist gives you the moment you set out. The other 7 wait at the places they happened, and the only way to read them is to walk there.
How long would Marco Polo take you?
The Polos took three and a half years to reach the Khan. Choose a month or a season instead and Bematist sets the pace from how much you already walk.
A rough guide, at about 0.75 m a step. In the app the pace comes from your own 30-day average in Apple Health, and stays fixed for the whole journey.
On the way
The words, at the places
8 passages, each waiting where it happened. You can see how far away the next one is, but not what it says.
Walk it with friends
Send a link and walk the same road together, each of you on your own streets, wherever you live.
No streak to lose
Steps come straight from Apple Health. A quiet day is just a short one, and your place on the road only moves forward.
More roads like this one
See the whole library, with a new book every month, chosen by walkers' vote.
Set out for Xanadu.
7,184 miles of The Travels of Marco Polo, on the walks you already take.
- For iPhone
- No account