In Xanadu

In 1986 William Dalrymple set out to retrace Marco Polo’s route from Jerusalem to the summer capital of Kublai Khan at Xanadu. Travelling with companions through the eastern Mediterranean, Iran, Pakistan and China, he follows the medieval itinerary as closely as modern borders, bureaucracy and transport allow.

The journey places Polo’s thirteenth-century account beside the political realities of the late Cold War. Encounters with pilgrims, officials, traders and fellow travellers turn the book into both an adventurous travel narrative and an examination of how routes once held together by the Mongol world had been divided by modern states.