Spoiler History: Starting from the Three Kingdoms

Chapter 727 Marco Polo
"Since this temple has Emperor Yang, it must have nothing to do with Chongba."

Queen Ma made a simple and reasonable guess, and then ignored it, just looking at the picture titled "Record of the Opening of the River" on the screen and exclaimed:

“This is a really nice painting.”

Zhu Yuanzhang said nothing, but looking at the lifelike working people painted on the paper, he suddenly had another thought:
"New Year's Day is next month, why not just call the second and third sons back to celebrate together."

"Then... find someone who is good at painting and paint the scene of our family reunion on a picture."

"This way, if my sons leave the capital to guard the Ming Dynasty in the future, we will have something to think about when we are in the capital."

This idea was not groundless. After listening to the young man's description of the unfortunate things he did not want to experience, Emperor Ming suddenly woke up:
He not only took it for granted that his son was able to handle government affairs with full energy, but also took it for granted that his family was harmonious and his wife was healthy.

Empress Ma was immediately moved upon hearing this, but still a little hesitant:
"But Xi'an and Taiyuan are busy with government affairs..."

Tomorrow the emperor waved his hand:
"Right now, the Hu Yuan are hiding in the north in a state of panic. Xi'an and Taiyuan are both strategic points. What do they have to be busy about?"

"If we ride fast down the river, we can reach Yingtian Prefecture in ten days at the fastest. We can catch the New Year's Eve banquet without any problem. We can return to Xi'an and Taiyuan after the Lantern Festival."

Since that was what she said, Empress Ma happily agreed.

Later generations said that she died suddenly and her husband said he wanted to change her fate, but Empress Ma herself did not feel much about these words.

Her family fell into poverty when she was young. She learned about military affairs when she was young. After she came of age, she was promised to her lover. Later, she followed him to fight in the north and south and finally became the mother of the country.

I have no regrets about what I have experienced and gained. If there is one thing that makes me worried, it is that my husband is still one of the heroes in the history of thousands of years.

She didn't know whether she could successfully avoid the original misfortune, but for now it would be the right thing to accompany her husband and son well.

Zhu Biao didn't think about so many things for the time being. This clever prince just looked at the attitude of praising the hardworking people on the screen, and vaguely felt that perhaps future generations would not approve of some of his father's behaviors.

[The Grand Canal did promote the further prosperity of Jiangnan, and the reputation of this prosperity spread to the sea routes through maritime trade, and ultimately, objectively speaking, promoted the publication of "The Travels of Marco Polo".

Generally speaking, most historians also regard The Travels of Marco Polo, published around 1300 AD, as the event node when Europe began to formally understand China.

It can be inferred from this travelogue that Marco Polo was born around 1254, at the end of the reign of Emperor Lizong of Song Dynasty, and arrived in China with his father and uncle around 1275. About sixteen years later, when Kublai Khan's daughter Kokozhen was going to the Ilkhanate to get married, the fleet took Marco Polo on the way and sent him back to Venice.

But a few years after Marco Polo returned, he had the misfortune of encountering a conflict between Venice and Genoa, and was directly captured and thrown into prison.

Life in jail was very boring, and the only entertainment was for the prisoners to tell each other about their past experiences to entertain themselves. Marco Polo's story attracted great praise from Rusticiano, an Italian businessman in the same cell, who thought that this story would be popular and could make a lot of money!
So, under the encouragement of Lao Lu, Lao Ma dictated and Lao Lu wrote, and the Travels of Marco Polo, which covered the customs and cultures of more than ten countries in the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa and other regions, was completed.

Although the book covers many countries and regions, China undoubtedly occupies the most important space. The book has four volumes, two of which are about China and Kublai Khan, which takes up half of the space. However, what we have described above are all speculations from Marco Polo's travel notes. In fact, whether Marco Polo himself reached China is still an unsolved case.

On the one hand, Lao Ma's description of certain aspects of China is very detailed, such as currency, salt production, taxation, and judicial system.

The Suzhou and Hangzhou chapter is full of praise for the scenery of West Lake, from pavilions and terraces to city operations, from trade processes to the famous places of Suzhou and Hangzhou, and the description is so detailed that it even shows how many bridges and squares there are in Hangzhou. These records are even more detailed than the "History of Yuan Dynasty".

But on the other hand, Lao Ma also spent a considerable amount of space to introduce how Kublai Khan liked him and gave him money, official positions, and servants. Logically speaking, such a favored Semite would inevitably be recorded in the history books, but neither the "History of Yuan Dynasty" nor the folk histories of the time mentioned a person like Marco Polo who was "favored by the emperor."

The most unreasonable thing is that Lao Ma claimed that he had lived in China for sixteen years, but he did not leave a single word in his travel notes about people's livelihood, such as tea culture, chopsticks, Taoism, Chinese characters, education system, foot binding, etc., as well as the Great Wall that had stretched across China for more than a thousand years at that time.

So we have talked about a saying in the past, that is, some scholars believe that Lao Ma may have just taken a long voyage, and all the things about China were heard from the sailors of the Yuan Dynasty at that time. After all, for the locals, there is really no need to introduce the commonplace people's livelihood-related things.

But looking back now, it doesn’t matter whether Marco Polo ever visited China in person. What matters is that "The Travels of Marco Polo" did play a role in promoting the times.

About twenty years after the publication of Lao Ma's Travels, another Italian merchant who traveled eastward, Odoric, also published Travels.

The common point of the two travelogues is that they both praised China's prosperity at that time to the utmost, almost making it a mythical country. This caused some Europeans at the time to be skeptical, while others were fascinated. In the end, the baton of searching for a rich China was unsurprisingly passed into the hands of Portugal.

Portugal still has two copies of Marco Polo's Travels, which were purchased by the Portuguese prince when he visited Venice in 1428. This is enough to show its guiding role in Portugal's navigation industry. More practical are other records left by Portugal.

In 1502, Portugal drew the first map with the equator and the Tropic of Cancer marked on it, which clearly marked how rich the area reached after passing through the Strait of Malacca was, and speculated that most of the treasures came from China.

In a letter written by the King of Portugal to the Catholic King in 1504, it was stated that the Portuguese fleet had successfully discovered the rich East where "a bottle (porcelain) was worth a hundred gold coins."

In 1508, the King of Portugal issued a lengthy order to the fleet commanders, requiring them to find out all the information about the "Qin people", including the size of their fleet, the number of artillery, their religious beliefs, whether they were pagans, and so on.

Subsequently, in 1510, Portugal seized Goa in India by force, declared it a Portuguese territory, and established a trading post called "Chinese Fortress".

The following year, the Portuguese fleet occupied the Strait of Malacca, and the Far East shipping route was completely opened up.

From this year on, the Portuguese began to travel to the East in an endless stream. Over the next fifty years, works such as "Record of the Situation in China", "History of the Thirty Years", "Geography of the East" and "Road to China" which detailed the situation in the East were published one after another. These works became the best supplement to "The Travels of Marco Polo". The Ming Empire at that time also gradually faded away from the mysterious veil in the eyes of the Portuguese.

After the Portuguese read these works and did whatever they wanted in the South China Sea, they formed the initial impression of the West on the Ming Empire at that time:
Rich, weak, and defenseless.

And eventually triggered the official collision between the East and the West. 】

(End of this chapter)