Marco Polo (1254-1329) has achieved an almost archetypal status as a traveller, and his Travels is one of the first great travel books of Western literature, outside the ancient world. The Travels recounts Polo`s journey to the eastern court of Kublai Khan, the chieftain of the Mongol empire which covered the Asian continent, but which was almost unknown to Polo`s contemporaries. Encompassing a twenty-four year period from 1721, Polo`s account details his travels in the service of the empire, from Beijing to northern India and ends with the remarkable story of Polo`s return voyage from the Chinese port of Amoy to the Persian Gulf. Alternately factual and fantastic, Polo`s prose at once reveals the medieval imagination`s limits, and captures the wonder of subsequent travel writers when faced with the unfamiliar, the exotic or the unknown.